


Ambiguity is an Itch You Can't Scratch

by NezumiPi



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Actual goddamn therapy, Child Abuse, Dissociation, Gen, Incest, M/M, Other, PTSD, Pedophilia, Sexual Abuse, Therapy, Trauma, like for real, spoilers for 4x07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:21:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 14
Words: 32,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21890389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NezumiPi/pseuds/NezumiPi
Summary: For someone who had been to a lot of therapy sessions, Elliot hadn't actually participated in much therapy. It didn't really work if you stonewalled your therapist and lied to her. But after Vera's insane meddling, Elliot decided to meet with Krista again.This is a more-or-less accurate portrayal of effective talk therapy for someone with Elliot's problems, adjusted as needed to keep it narratively interesting - actual therapy is very repetitive.Content warning: Very graphic and detailed discussion of child sexual abuse.
Comments: 65
Kudos: 213





	1. Back to the Past

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: This is exactly what it says on the tin - it's a very detailed, very graphic discussion of child sexual abuse. Effective therapy for trauma involves dealing with the details, even - perhaps especially - the revolting ones. The purpose of this content is not to arouse or titillate, which is why I elected not to give it an "Explicit" rating, but there will be specific talk of sexual feelings, body parts, and behaviors in the context of trauma.
> 
> Don't-try-this-at-home warning: I wrote this because I'd always wanted to write an accurate portrayal of therapy. Still, I've edited for space, repetition, coherence, etc. Don't mistake this for a formal case study. While I've made an effort to apply and explain real, evidence-based therapeutic techniques, don't attempt these on yourself or others without guidance from a professional.
> 
> Elliot's recalled narratives are told from a child's perspective - I've written them as flashbacks rather than present-day Elliot speaking. That's why they're marked off as flashbacks rather than using quotation marks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The focus of this story is on the treatment of PTSD in a person with severe dissociative symptoms, not on treating dissociative identity disorder per se. Clinicians vary a lot in their understanding of and approach to DID. If you have strong feelings about DID or its treatment, you may find Krista's approach upsetting.

_When I was three or four years old, my dad taught me Boolean operators by playing a game he made up called Shoe Store. We would gather all the shoes in the house and lay them out on the living room floor. Then, dad would pretend to be a customer and ask for a shoe that was small-AND-red or has-laces-AND-NOT-black-soles. I would find a match and win the game. Then we would put the shoes away exactly where we found them so mom wouldn’t get mad._

_Once I got good at Shoe Store, dad made up bigger puzzles that were like a riddle and a scavenger hunt put together. I would have to find a thing that was clear-AND-NOT-made-of-glass-AND-bigger-than-twelve-inches-OR-smaller-than-two-inches. (It was a plastic Lego windshield.)_

_We were playing one of those search string games when I learned a new word. My dad had sent me to find a Tinkertoy that was round-AND-NOT-blue-OR-green. It was too easy. I found a red wheel and I was going to take it to my dad when it hit me that there was another answer. A green object of any shape would also fit. There were two ways to group the words. One was (round AND (NOT (blue OR green))). The solution had to be round and it must be neither blue nor green. The other was ((round AND NOT blue) OR green). In that one, the solution could either be round-AND-NOT-blue OR it could be green. I brought my dad a green triangular panel and he taught me about ambiguity._  
  
_“Ambiguity is the enemy of programmers,” he said to me, rubbing his hands together. “Ambiguity is when a command has two meanings. Good code is never ambiguous. But talking, talking sometimes is. Just the way of the world, kiddo.”_

* * *

“How are you feeling on the medication?” Krista clicked her pen, preparing to take notes.

Elliot looked very slightly relieved, maybe that they were beginning with something banal instead of jumping right into the thick of it. “Hungry. For sugar. Yesterday I ate half a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch dry.”

“Appetite changes do happen sometimes. As your body acclimates, side effects like that will usually go away. Are you worried about weight gain?”

Elliot shook his head. “I don’t really care one way or the other.”

“Any other changes?”

“I can still hear him and see him, but he seems… less opaque. He’s not literally translucent, but his presence doesn’t block reality.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“I’m okay with it. He’s pretty pissed.” Elliot shrugged, indifferent to his other self's annoyance.

“Did you explain to him why you’ve chosen to take this medication?”

“Yeah. He gets that the narrative thing you talked about won’t work if I keep dissociating and that the meds will cut back on the dissociation, he just doesn’t think I should be doing it at all.”

“By ‘it’, do you mean therapy in general? Or narrative therapy in particular?”

“He wasn’t real specific. He yelled at me for a bit, then he complained about copyright law for almost an hour and fucked with the default settings on my computer.” 

Krista nodded. That sounded like pouting more than forcible resistance. She looked at the completed worksheets Elliot had turned in. If he was being honest (while she recognized that was not a given, she nonetheless had to hope), he had rehearsed each skill at least once per day over the past two weeks. The treatment she had selected for Elliot – trauma-informed cognitive-behavioral therapy, or TF-CBT – went in three phases. They were currently in the first, which involved laying out a roadmap for treatment and explaining its rationale (relatively easy) as well as psychologically stabilizing Elliot (much harder). The goal wasn’t to completely normalize his emotions – that wouldn’t be possible without addressing the underlying trauma – but to ensure he had enough inner resources to face what had happened without dissociating or decompensating.

To that end, she had taught him several new skills and asked him to practice daily. Diaphragmatic breathing and progressive muscle relaxation were fairly straightforward, simple physical techniques to guide the body into a more relaxed state. Grounding skills were more varied and therefore more complicated. Grounding used the senses to anchor the body in the present moment, whether that meant touching the cold metal of a chair leg, listening to the car horns outside, or calculating the exact number of tiles in the ceiling. Since the environment changed, the sensory foci did as well. According to Elliot’s worksheet, he had spent time every day focusing on each of his senses, with modest success.

Which meant it was time to begin the second phase of the treatment. At various continuing education conferences, she’d heard it called narrative integration, imaginal exposure, or simply exposure therapy. To clients, she usually used the term ‘narrative therapy’ because the word ‘imaginal’ was unfamiliar and the word ‘exposure’ had sexual connotations.

“The next step is to make a list of memories that especially trouble you. If you’re not sure what to include, that’s okay. For many people, it helps to focus on ‘the first and the worst’ – that is, the first time particular acts occurred and instances that were unusually bad for any reason. For each memory, you’re going to rate it on that zero to one hundred scale that we’ve talked about: subjective units of distress or SUDS.”

Krista lay a worksheet on the table between them. It was just a two-column chart, with a space to list events and a space to list SUDS ratings.

Elliot stared at it. Not for the first time, Krista found herself wondering what it was about his face that made his eyes so prominent.

“This doesn’t have to be final. We can modify it later. We just need a starting point.”

Elliot continued staring at the worksheet for several moments before raising his eyes to meet Krista’s. He looked cold.

“It’s you again, isn’t it?” Krista sounded slightly disappointed.

“What kind of greeting is that?” Mr. Robot smacked his lips. “Gonna give a man a complex.”

“I’m trying to talk to Elliot.”

“And I wish you the best.”

“You’re still angry with me. Because I hurt him.”

Mr. Robot said nothing, but rubbed his thumb against his index and middle fingers, as if he were fidgeting with an unseen cigarette.

“You’re right to be angry. It was too soon for him to know. And even if it weren’t, it was certainly the wrong way for him to find out.”

It was difficult to argue with someone who agreed with him, so Mr. Robot allowed his expression to relax slightly. “What am I doing here, anyway? I didn’t force my way out, and you obviously didn’t call me up.”

“Just before you emerged, I asked Elliot a question about his childhood. I imagine you’re here to play the role you’ve always played, to help him avoid thinking about his trauma.”

“And why is that a bad thing, hm? The world’s fucked up enough as it is. Why shove another misery suppository up his ass?”

“Avoidance isn’t always a bad thing, but some of the techniques Elliot has developed to avoid distress ultimately cause more problems. Such as his substance use. Can you tell me that’s never put him at risk?”

“No arguments there. He can’t watch his back when he’s stoned off his ass. But how do you know he’s not going to leave here and go looking for a hit?”

“I don’t. I hope he won’t. But if I waited until he was fully emotionally stable to begin processing his trauma, I might be waiting a very long time. Possibly his whole life.”

Mr. Robot grimaced resentfully. He didn’t like agreeing with people who he was pissed at.

“Whether you approve of this course of treatment or not, I hope I can count on you to help Elliot to face his pain, or if he feels he must avoid it, to do so in the safest possible manner.”

“I don’t control him.” Mr. Robot snorted. “But yeah, if I can keep him from stripping down in front of a dealer called _Hard_ Andy, I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you.”

They both sat in silence for a moment. Neither had expected to reach détente so quickly.

Krista broke the silence. “Since you’re here, I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“Can you sound a little less like a cop when you say that?”

“Do you remember when you came into existence?”

“Do you?” snapped Mr. Robot.

“Some personalities come into existence gradually. Others report a single, specific event.”

“Must’ve been gradual. I was his imaginary friend. I mean, he actually called me Mr. Robot.”

“Were you a robot?”

“Sometimes. Sort of. Most of the time I think I might have been an android – looks human, acts human, but Intel inside.”

“Did you always look like his father?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t usually think a lot about what I looked like.”

“Did you have a body capable of having sex? I mean did you have a penis? Mouth? Anus?”

“You’re asking if I was smooth like a goddamn Ken doll? That’s a weird fucking question to ask about a kid’s imaginary friend. You sure you’re not some kind of pervert?”

Krista waited.

“Yeah, I had parts. Still do, thank you very much. Not that long, but very girthy.”

“How did you know?”

“Know what? My own body? What the fuck kind of question is that?”

“You came from Elliot’s mind. It was up to him which physical attributes to include and which to elide over.” She paused. “You don’t know what the doll’s body looks like unless you take off its clothes.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Elliot told me that when he was incarcerated, you took a beating for him.”

“Ohh,” Mr. Robot managed to give the word three or four extra syllables. “You’re asking if I ever took it up the ass on behalf of Captain Bug-Eye here, aren’t you?” He gestured to his own chest at the ‘Captain Bug-Eye’ comment, somehow managing to look as though he were indicating someone else.

Mr. Robot glared. Krista just looked sad. She broke the stalemate by explaining her line of questioning. “I’m assessing your ability to tolerate distress without pushing it away, dissociating, and avoiding the way Elliot does. For this treatment to work, Elliot will need to integrate your memories with his own. He will need to come to terms with the fact that anything which happened to you, in fact happened to him.”

“That sure as fuck doesn’t sound like helping Elliot,” snapped Mr. Robot. “That sounds like more of the shitty therapizing that broke him down in the first place.”

Krista waited. A level of comfort with silence was an important therapeutic skill.

“You want proof I can handle it? I can. I played altar boy to Father Edward’s pervy benedictions. See, I can say that no problem.”

“Can you say it simply, directly, and without euphemism? In a way that connects with how you were really feeling at the time, even if what you were feeling was confused and powerless?”

“Sure. I’m a good talker.”

“Give it a try. Tell me about a time you absorbed the abuse. Doesn’t have to be the first or the worst or anything special.”

“Fine.” Mr. Robot scoffed. “This one night, I woke up and he was standing there, jerking off. He hadn’t taken my clothes all the way off, but he slid them around so stuff was showing. I could’ve told him off, but he wasn’t touching me, so I just ignored him and went back to sleep.”

“And that’s the end of the story?”

“What else is there? You said pick anything. If you wanted the felonies you should have said so.”

“I don’t think you fell back asleep. Not that quickly.” She paused. “Did he masturbate to orgasm?”

“No point in it otherwise.”

“Where did he ejaculate?”

There was a very brief moment in which Mr. Robot appeared visibly thrown by the question, before returning to his usual vulgarity. “His hand, mostly. But I got a few drops on my face. A baptism, if you’ll permit a return to the altar boy metaphor. Then he grabbed a tissue and wiped it off.”

“So you were awake at least until then. What were you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“What were you feeling?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It wasn’t a big deal. He didn’t even touch me.”

“He moved your clothes aside to eroticize your body. He exposed himself to you. He masturbated to your image. He ejaculated onto your face and wiped it off with a tissue.”

“And I’m sure that would have been goddamn traumatic if a little kid had been there, which is exactly why I was trying to keep a little kid from remembering it.”

“Mr. Robot, you were a little kid. You were a little boy imagining that he was big.”

“Mr. Robot,” he echoed. “Such a stupid name.”

“What were you thinking while he masturbated?”

“I didn’t think anything!” Mr. Robot snapped.

Krista waited.

“I thought it looked…not violent but jerky? Erratic, maybe? I probably didn’t know that word. I thought it was a strange way to touch your own body. I thought it was private, something I wasn’t supposed to see, and I felt guilty for looking. I didn’t want to get caught being awake. I didn’t know what would happen, but I thought it would be bad. Worse.”

“Did you think you would be punished for seeing your father’s genitals?”

“No, this wasn’t the first time he’d shown me- it wasn’t- I thought he would think I wanted to watch.”

“You thought he would take it as a sign you were curious, or even aroused.”

Mr. Robot nodded.

“And what would happen then?”

“He would have tried to teach me something.” 


	2. Three Ninjas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've decided to approach the trauma narrations different ways in each chapter. Sometimes it's more like a flashback, sometimes it's more like present-Elliot speaking. Also, his trauma narrations won't occur in chronological order, but rather in the order Krista thinks will be most therapeutic.

“Sorry about the-“ Elliot waved his hand at the worksheet. “I tried to write things normal, but he kept deleting it.”

Krista looked at Elliot’s trauma hierarchy, his list of upsetting memories that they would defuse through repetition. It was normal for patients to begin with a somewhat muddled or incomplete list, or to name an event in an indistinct way to avoid really thinking about it, but Elliot’s worksheet was limited even by those standards. The paper itself had obviously been crumpled and flattened multiple times. Whatever he had initially written had been thoroughly crossed out by meticulously drawing hundreds of overlapping X’s so that not even the indentations remained. What had survived this purge was a handful of movie titles. Or rather, she recognized _Kindergarten Cop_ and _Alien 3_. There were three other lines filled in, not movie titles that she recognized, but from their prior sessions, she knew that Elliot’s father had taken him to the movies frequently, often to low-budget flicks that would have flown under her radar. She assumed _Candyman_ , _Three Ninjas_ , and _Malice_ fell in that category. At least each line was paired with a subjective distress rating from 0 to 100, as requested.

“I appreciate that you kept trying,” said Krista. “Tell me about what you wrote down.”

“Me and my dad, we would go to the movies. Or watch a video. And my mom and Darlene would go to sleep. So that’s what we were watching before when…for the things I wrote down in the first place.”

“Can I ask, when you wrote down the events originally, how did you feel, seeing them on the page?”

“It was…” Elliot raised his shoulders and twisted his neck, an uncomfortable gesture that looked as if he were trying to unscrew his head from his body. “I didn’t want to look at them.”

“Did you feel relieved when Mr. Robot deleted them for you?”

Elliot thought for a moment. Then, carefully, “Yes.”

“Any time you feel happy or relieved, your brain takes note of what you were doing just before, and you become a little more likely to do that thing again. Every time you start to think about what happened, you feel distressed. When you avoid those thoughts, you feel relief. Unfortunately, that makes you more likely to avoid them in the future. The avoidance grows stronger and stronger until it makes its own problems.”

“It’s a loop,” said Elliot. “Doing this narrative thing, you said it makes the distress go away without avoiding. An alternate exit condition.”

Krista nodded. “Are you ready to try it?”

Elliot’s eyes briefly grew wider, perhaps in surprise. Maybe he thought that they wouldn’t move forward with his mangled trauma hierarchy, but he angled his head to the left and said, “Yes.”

Krista looked again at the worksheet. For a range of reasons, she typically asked clients to begin toward the middle of the list, but Elliot needed to successfully recall a memory without reflexively dissociating or allowing his alternate personality to take over – to put it simply, he needed a win. So, she selected the movie title rated least distressing. “I’d like you to close your eyes and tell me about the incident related to the movie _Three Ninjas_.”

* * *

I get the idea from the movie _Three Ninjas_ , which I only saw because that’s what David McCrae did for his birthday and his mom made him invite all the boys in the class. The movie is about these three brothers who are learning martial arts when a bad guy tries to kidnap them and hold them hostage. They kick the bad guys and play tricks on them to escape. That’s what all the other boys were excited about.

What I was excited about was the alarm system that the brothers made for themselves. The boys all shared a bedroom and it had a red light bulb mounted in the wall. When the bad guys got close, the alarm lit up and warned the boys.

I think a lot about that. If they could make it, so could I.

I don’t have any books on alarm systems, but I know stuff about circuits. I ask Mr. Robot to help. He says an alarm is just input and output, like a computer. The output can be anything that makes a noise or lights up and the input has to do something when it detects people.

“Could I use a camera to see them?”

Mr. Robot scratches his beard. “I don’t think so. A camera doesn’t really see. It records things and shows them to people who see them.”

“How does the input make the output turn on?”

“Well,” says Mr. Robot, “everything is circuits, right? So, it either has to complete a circuit or break a circuit.”

I think about that for a moment. “Then I don’t think we need a CPU. We can just make an open circuit where the input closes the circuit. Then the output will turn on.”

“That’s really clever, kiddo!” Mr. Robot claps his hands. “You have really good ideas!”

We get to work. The output is easy. I open up a toy space gun that makes noises and flashes LEDs when you pull the trigger. I get extra wires from the basement and bond them to the trigger wires. That’s hard because they’re small and I don’t have wire strippers or a soldering iron, but I bite off the plastic wire covering with my teeth and use aluminum foil to seal the connections. It’s Mr. Robot’s idea to put Play-Doh in between different wires as a resistor, so they don’t accidentally touch.

The input is harder. We dig a cereal box out of the trash and cut it into two big squares. I’m not very good at cutting with scissors, but Mr. Robot says it doesn’t have to look good to work. We put foil on the squares and stick one wire to each. Then, I take a sponge from under the sink. I try to cut it up, but my scissors won’t work. Mr. Robot says I can use a knife to cut it if I’m very careful. I take my time and pay attention and I don’t get cut. I put the sponge between the squares, so now the foil parts don’t touch unless you step on it hard. That will be the input. The circuit will be open unless someone steps on it. If they do, the circuit will be closed and the space gun will go off.

I color the cardboard squares brown so they blend in and I set them up on the stairs. I hook up the wires that link the input and output, go to my room, and wait.

I really want it to work.

Mr. Robot says whether it works or not, it was fun to build.

And then my dad is in my room.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says. He’s holding the input. “Were you building something? Can’t leave stuff like that on the stairs. If I hadn’t seen it, I could have tripped.”

“I’ll throw it away,” I say. “It didn’t work.”

“Hey, don’t feel bad. I leaned over to tie my shoe. Probably the only reason I saw it.” He looks at it more closely. “It looks like you found the right wires from your phaser.” He bends the output wires and presses them together. The toy lights up and makes a pew-pew sound. “You did all this by yourself?”

I don’t say anything. Dad doesn’t know about Mr. Robot.

“It’s a very good idea. We can keep working on it. Maybe set it up outside the front door, keep robbers out.”

That’s a bad idea. Robbers wouldn’t use the front door. And the alarm only works if someone hears it, so it wouldn’t help if we weren’t at home. And besides, it wasn’t there for robbers. It was there for…

Dad says, “Your mom won’t be home from work for a while. We should have some guy time, just you and me.”

That’s ambiguity, because guy time could be a lot of different things. We could watch a movie or build Legos or look at computer catalogues or-

Dad shuts my bedroom door.

We play poker. I’m getting good at knowing all the hands and their chances. We play the kind where you get to trade in some cards and I know that it’s smarter to go for more pairs and three-of-a-kind than to try to get a straight or a flush. I’m down to just my underwear when Darlene wakes up from her nap.

* * *

Elliot opened his eyes, signaling that his story was over.

“Give me a distress rating,” said Krista.

“Forty-five.”

In Krista’s opinion, Elliot looked a little worse than a forty-five, shoulders back, jaw jutting forward, but perfect precision was not the goal of the exercise. “All right.” She wrote the number down. “Now tell the story again. Be sure to mention how you were feeling. And include any details you recall about playing strip poker.”

Elliot shut his eyes and told the story a second time. He gave fewer specifics about the alarm system. He used the word ‘dread’. He added that it was cold without his shirt on, how he tried to sit in a way that would hide his body.

“You’re doing very good,” said Krista. “Give me a SUDS rating.”

“Sixty.”

“Tell it again.” She had to sound confident and authoritative at this point. SUDS ratings usually went down with each telling, but Elliot’s first attempt had been almost entirely devoid of emotional content, so it was unsurprising that his second evoked more distress. If he gave up now, it would reinforce his avoidance.

Elliot breathed audibly for a moment, but recounted the story a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth.

Krista smiled gently. “You did very well.” She turned her clipboard around to show Elliot the hand-drawn graph of his SUDS ratings. After the second telling, they went down steadily, from 35 to 20 to 10.

Elliot looked at the graph before turning his head to the side. “In the story, it wouldn’t have worked anyway.”

“You mean the security system?”

“Yeah. Even if he hadn’t seen it, what would I have done with a few seconds’ warning?”

“Creating security wasn’t your responsibility. You gave your father a very clear signal that you felt unsafe. He chose to ignore it.”

“I just sat there playing cards, like the rules of the game mattered.”

“Elliot, you told me once that there was a family with elementary-aged children living on the first floor of your apartment building. If one of those children approached you and asked you to help them build a security system around their room, what would you think?”

Elliot said nothing.

“I don’t want these thoughts to take away from what you’ve just achieved. You took a memory so upsetting you couldn’t bear to even see it on paper and you brought it down to a manageable level. I hope you can take pride in that.”


	3. Additional Ninjas

Krista clipped the audio file of Elliot’s _Three Ninjas_ narrative. She wasn’t particularly tech savvy, but she had extensive practice in this one narrow skill. “Do you understand why it’s important for you to listen to the audio file every day this week?”

“So I get desensitized to it.”

“That’s right. And to become desensitized, you have to pay close attention. If you distract yourself, you’re not really experiencing it, so I need you to sit or lie down in a quiet room, turn off devices, and put away anything you might be tempted to look at.”

“Okay.”

“Before you begin, I want you to set an alarm on your phone to vibrate every five minutes. When it goes off, I want you to write down a SUDS rating, from 0 to 100. You’ll keep listening to the file on a loop until your current distress rating is no more than 50% of your peak rating, or until 60 minutes have passed, whichever comes first. Write the ratings on paper. You can transfer them to the computer afterward.”

“This is…a lot.”

“It is. For many people, it is the hardest thing they’ll ever do. One of the more hopeful things I can tell you is that how overwhelmed you feel when starting it does not predict how successful it will be.” Krista folded her hands together. “Let’s talk about what you’re going to do after you finish these home sessions.”

“I dunno.” Elliot shrugged. “I’ll do whatever.”

“These exercises are draining. I’d most like to see you reward yourself with something comforting and relaxing – cook a meal, watch a movie, talk to your sister. It would worry me if you put yourself in a risky situation while you were in a mentally vulnerable state. It would also worry me if you felt the only way you could cope with these sessions was to do something that could ultimately harm yourself, like using drugs.”

It occurred to Elliot that he didn’t really have any hobbies, not legal, healthy ones anyway. And he didn’t really have anything he liked to do to calm himself when he was stressed – after all, he had spent much of his life pretending that the worst parts of it simply didn’t exist. He realized that by admitting this, he could score brownie points with Krista for doing what a good patient should. Was that manipulative? Probably. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea. “Don’t you have a list? Of things people do to for fun, I mean. I think you gave me one a long time ago.”

“Yes, I believe I did.” Krista got up from her chair and opened an unlocked drawer of her filing cabinet. She riffled through the folders before pulling out a photocopied handout that read _Pleasant Activities Schedule - Adult_. “There are more than three hundred options on there. Some aren’t practical at all hours and some just won’t appeal to you. You might find it useful to look at the list before you begin the rehearsal session, to identify a handful of options. It can be helpful to know there’s a reward at the end.” She smiled slightly as she handed the packet to Elliot. “I’m glad you asked me, Elliot. It’s a good sign that you recognized the need and spoke up.”

“What if Mr. Robot takes over?”

“He’s agreed that this is in your best interests. And, you’re going to be doing grounding exercises throughout. Just like we practiced. You’ll notice the feelings on your skin. To begin with, you’re going to keep your eyes open so you can see the real world. And on your way home today, you’re going to buy a pack of mints. Let them dissolve in your mouth one at a time. Again, eventually you’re going to stop that, but to begin, I want you to have multiple sensory cues linking you to your body in the present.”

* * *

Elliot lowered himself onto Krista’s couch and hesitantly lowered his hood.

“What happened here?” Krista touched her own forehead in the same spot as the abrasion on Elliot’s face. 

Elliot scowled. “He wouldn’t let me listen to the file. This isn’t the half of it.” He rubbed his injury. “He broke my headphones. He flooded my bathroom. On Thursday, I tried to listen to it and woke up on the Staten Island Ferry.”

“Did you talk with him directly?”

“He won’t listen to me. He just shouts or disappears.”

“Can I speak with him?”

Elliot shrugged with his hands up, a gesture of, ‘I don’t know, can you?’.

* * *

“I appreciate you speaking with me.”

Mr. Robot raised cupped a hand around his ear. “Would the court stenographer please read back the part where I give a FUCK what you appreciate?” He looked from side to side as if checking all corners of the room for a transcriptionist. “No? Nothing?” he asked, voice dripping with sarcastic incredulity. “Then let the record show that I care about your dumbfuck plans slightly less than I care about the declining quality of artisanal cupcakes.”

“When we spoke previously, I thought you agreed to help Elliot in this, that ultimately it would be safer for him.”

“That was before I saw what you were making him do.”

“Making him? You feel this process is forced?”

“I feel this process is bullshit. What the hell are you doing making him think about that shit? Do you get your rocks off imagining little boys stripping down for their dads? You probably listen to the session files with a dildo up your ass.”

Krista took a moment to collect herself, to not take the accusation personally. She considered her toolbox of therapeutic skills and settled on reflective listening. “You’re wondering if I have an ulterior motive.”

“I’m assuming you do. Everyone does. And don’t think for a minute that I’ve forgotten how you sold us out to Vera.”

“Yes, I did,” Krista acknowledged. “I was very scared. I really believed he would kill me.” Not apologizing, not even excusing, just the facts. “Do you think that proves I don’t really care about Elliot?”

“You’re paid to care. It’s your job.”

“That’s true. But sometimes the people who love us most, the people who aren’t paid professionals, don’t have the skills to give us the help we need.”

“I care about him more than you do,” said Mr. Robot, with a confident snort that communicated a blithe certainty.

“It’s important to you that I understand the depth of your commitment.”

“I think it’s important that you stop fucking with his head.”

“I’m fucking with his head?” Krista carefully avoided placing stress on _I’m_.

“Look, you might have your reasons. And I’ll even admit that you probably think you’re helping. But you’re not.”

Krista looked at her notes. “You featured heavily in Elliot’s narrative from last session. Does that bother you?”

“Do I look scared?”

He didn’t, but Krista nonetheless gave a slight shrug. She said, “You hacked me. You must know where I worked before I opened my own practice.”

“Some victim advocacy center, or something.”

“Safe Horizon. I worked there for over a decade. One of my responsibilities was interviewing young children who witnessed violent crimes to gather evidence and determine if they could give valid testimony. Since young children spend most of their time around their families, the crime victim was usually a family member, so they were not only contending with the trauma of witnessing the crime, but also the harm to or loss of a loved one. And there was this thing that happened – not every time, maybe one child in ten or twenty. The child would come to me, overwhelmed with guilt, and confess that they knew the crime was going to happen and failed to warn anyone.”

“How’d they know?”

“They’d had a prophetic dream. Or god told them. Or they’d read it in a book. I had a little girl tell me she heard it as a secret message in radio static.”

“Sounds like you should’ve been working for the X-files.” The right-hand corner of Mr. Robot's mouth quirked up in half a grin.

“The dream never happened. It’s called omen formation. They made up a warning after the crime occurred.”

“What would be the point of that?”

“Adults forget how terrifying it is to be a child. You have so little control over the world. You’re completely dependent on the whims of adults, and that’s just everyday life. And then one day something terrible happens. And the truth of the matter is, you can’t do anything about it. But that powerlessness is so unbearable that you convince yourself it’s your fault, because guilt is better than terror. Guilt implies control.”

Mr. Robot said nothing.

“I’ve seen children wracked with guilt because they couldn’t physically overpower mom’s boyfriend or leap in front of a bullet. But my omen formation kids, they were smarter than that. They knew there was no rational way for them to protect their family, but they still couldn’t bear the loss of control, so they made up an irrational way.”

“And it was your job to milk these pediatric head cases for evidence?" Mr. Robot offered a critical scoff. "That’s fucked up. Have you considered talking to a psychologist?”

“You don’t see how this might be related to your own situation?”

“I don’t think I’m some clairvoyant bed wetter.”

Krista changed tactics slightly. “It hurts you, doesn’t it, to see him in pain.”

“I can deal with a little hurt.”

“Yes, you can. You’re the shield. You only attack to defend. But it does hurt. And we didn’t ask your permission to make you relive these memories.”

“I’m telling you; I can take it. It’s him I’m worried about.” 

“And yet you hurt him to prevent him from listening to that recording. You really hurt him. He looks as though he’s been punched in the face.”

“BECAUSE YOU’RE REPLAYING MY FAILURES!” roared Mr. Robot. He kneaded his fingers together as though he had to actively prevent himself from forming a fist. “It was my job to take care of him. It was my job to keep him safe. And I- in that stupid story, I’m just playing along. I know it won’t work, but I don’t warn him. I let him use a knife to build his pointless contraption. I don’t tell him to take the knife and hide it under his pillow. Every story on that rat shit movie list he made is one of my failures! Every story he’s not telling you is one of my failures!” Mr. Robot’s voice got softer. “And every moment now that he knows what happened to him, that’s my failure too.”

Krista’s instinct was to offer comfort, but she knew it would not be well received. “Mr. Robot, how tall are you?”

He looked wary – he obviously knew this was a therapist trick, but he answered, “About 5-foot-10.”

“And if I were to measure your height right now, would it be 5-foot-10?”

Mr. Robot said nothing.

“Or would you be closer to, I don’t know, 5’7”? Maybe 5’8”?” She didn’t know Elliot’s exact height, but she had plenty of observations from which to estimate.

Mr. Robot said nothing.

“And if we went back to that day with Elliot’s security system, and I measured the body which had the hands you could use to build or fight, the mouth you could use to speak, how tall would it be? 5’10”? Or closer to 4-and-a-half feet? Maybe fifty or sixty pounds? Could that body really have fought off its father, even with a knife?”

Mr. Robot said nothing.

“And that body, who did that body rely on for its food and shelter and clothing? Could that body really oppose the person who was responsible for meeting all of its needs?”

Mr. Robot’s hands were still, perched in front of his lips. His mouth had fallen very slightly open so that he almost appeared to be frozen in the act of raising his thumb to suck.

“Did that body fail? Or was it taking comfort in imagining it had special, irrational powers?”

Mr. Robot dropped his hands and spoke softly. “I’ve protected him. I have. When he was in high school, Angela dragged him to a party and he went off with this guy who was offering him drugs. And the guy wanted…Elliot didn’t see it, but I did. I made him throw up all over himself. I got him out of there, safe.” Mr. Robot raised his hand to his forehead, moved his fingers, and brought it back down – a pantomime of removing a hat. “I hate this,” he whispered. “I remember looking up at his dad. Trying not to think too hard about the physics because it didn’t actually make sense. I would see myself the same size as him, but how could he lift me? Why were his clothes smaller than mine? Why wouldn’t his dick fit in my mouth? I would ignore all that and just focus on trying to keep Elliot safe.”

“Because if you were an adult, if you could protect him, if you could protect yourself, then you had some control over what was happening. Then you weren’t powerless.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pleasant Events Schedules are an actual therapeutic tool. [Here's an example.](https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/~/media/CCI/Mental%20Health%20Professionals/Depression/Depression%20-%20Information%20Sheets/Depression%20Information%20Sheet%20-%2006%20-%20Fun%20Activities%20Catalogue.pdf)


	4. Kindergarten Cop

“Whatever you said to Mr. Robot must’ve worked. He hung around all week, on the edge of my field of vision, but he let me do the homework.”

Krista picked up Elliot’s tracking sheet. He had completed the exercise a respectable five times in the past week and his SUDS scores showed a predictable pattern of decline, both within and across sessions. “And how did you feel, repeating that narrative over and over again?”

“By the third or fourth day, it was almost boring. I had to work not to get distracted.” Elliot looked down. “It’s still a bad memory, just not, you know…it doesn’t make me feel like I’m drowning.”

“That’s exactly what we’re hoping for. Are you ready to try it again?”

Elliot nodded. He didn’t look confident exactly, but not quite as small as before.

“Tell me about the memory associated with _Kindergarten Cop_.”

* * *

My dad and me were about to go home from the video store, from returning an overdue VHS of _Kindergarten Cop_.

“You want to give it a go?” Dad took his hands off the steering wheel and reached toward me.

I knew it was illegal for kids to drive, so I looked around. There were no other cars in the parking lot, except for a real junky one at the far end that I figured belonged to the guy who works there. “For real?” I said, but I already knew the answer. My dad didn’t joke around like that.

“Sure. Just a little. I won’t let you get hurt. So how ‘bout it?”

I took off my seat belt so I could switch places with my dad, but he wasn’t moving.

“You have to sit on my lap, kiddo. You can’t reach the pedals and see over the dashboard. But I’ll let you steer and flip the turn signal.”

I was too old to sit on my dad’s lap, but I didn’t care at all, not if I got to drive a car. I climbed over the gearshift and settled into the driver’s seat. I put my hands on the wheel.

“That’s the spirit.” Dad smiled.

We were driving on a real road. I felt something like laughing in my lungs. A happy feeling. Excited, maybe, or even proud. I wouldn’t brag to other kids about it because my dad could get in trouble, but I’d know that I drove a car and they didn’t, and that would make me feel good.

I’d played racing games before, but they were nothing like actual driving. There was no lag and real cars (or this real car at least) slowly moved to the right if I didn’t keep the steering wheel turned just a little bit.

“We’re gonna turn right up here,” said my dad. He started to reach for the turn signal, but I got there first. “You learn fast, kiddo.”

I didn’t have to look in the mirror to know he was smiling.

I made another turn, a little less smooth. The car zig-zagged, which made my butt slide around a little, but it was okay. Dad would grab the steering wheel if we were going to crash.

Dad’s lap was lumpy. It wasn’t like that when I first sat down. Where did it come from? I twisted my legs to get away from the lumpy bit and dad said, “Okay, you’ve got to shift back to the passenger’s seat before we get home. Mom won’t like it if she sees you driving.”

He put his hands on mine to show me how to make a tiny bit of a turn so the car moved to the edge of the road. We set the gearshift to park and I climbed back into my usual seat. I looked back at him and I could see it, the lump in his lap.

“What’s-“ I started to ask.

“You can’t tell anybody about this,” he said, “or I’ll get in big trouble. Okay?”

I nodded. I knew I had to keep this a secret if I ever wanted to drive a car again, at least before I turned sixteen.

“You have to say it out loud, Elliot. I have to be sure.”

“I won’t tell mom or anybody else.”

My dad reached over with his right arm and hugged me. “I knew I could count on you. I love you, kiddo.”

It wasn’t until we got home and I was brushing my teeth that I realized, _‘You can’t tell anybody about this,’_ was ambiguity. The word _this_ could mean different things. It could mean driving, but it didn’t have to.

Sometimes my dad slept in my bed. It was usually when my mom was mad at him, but she was mad at him a lot, so I didn’t always know for sure. This time I knew because I heard them arguing, loud enough I could hear their voices, but not loud enough that I could hear what it was about.

“Why were you fighting?” I asked. I was just wearing my briefs. They had Batman on them. I took off my pajamas because it was too hot.

“Because she’s a miserable, loveless cunt.” My dad was just wearing shorts. He was probably too hot also.

“What’s a cunt?”

“It’s a…it’s a dirty word for…I shouldn’t have said that. Elliot, that was a mistake I just made and you can’t repeat it, okay?”

I nodded. “But what’s it mean?”

“It’s a swear word for vagina. Just like dick’s a swear word for penis. But it doesn’t really mean that. It just means a person who’s being a jerk. And I shouldn’t have said it, and you definitely shouldn’t say it.”

I thought about that. My dad told me once that if kids used too many swear words, other adults thought those kids had bad parents.

Dad rolled on his side so he was pressed against me. He held his fingers over my chest so they just barely touched and moved them back and forth. It didn’t hurt and it didn’t tickle. It just felt weird. His chest was hairy. I wondered if I was supposed to do the same thing back to him, but I would just be touching the hair. His hand moved down around my belly button.

“You’re a good kid, Elliot.”

His hand kept going up and down and I noticed something. I scooted over so we weren’t touching. “Why is your lap lumpy?” I pointed at his crotch.

When I looked at his face, it was a little red and he wasn’t looking right at me. “That’s…that’s something most kids don’t worry about until they’re older. But you’re so smart. If you want to know now, I’ll explain it to you.”

Before I could say whether I wanted to know now or not, he reached down and slid his shorts off his legs. I could see then that the lump was his penis. It was basically the same shape as mine, but instead of just hanging down, it was sticking up and out.

“It’s called an erection, or getting hard. It might not happen to you for a few years, but in men it happens all the time.” He looked at my hand and said, “You can touch it if you want.”

My hand was reached out at it, but not moving, like I decided to grab it and froze before I could. I didn’t make my hand do that. It did it on its own. But he was saying I should touch it, so I made my elbow straight and my fingers long. The tip of my middle finger touched the long flat side. It was warm. I couldn’t really tell anything else. I pulled my hand back.

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” said my dad, “feels good, actually.”

I wasn’t sure I believed that. It looked red and tight, like sunburned skin.

My dad put his whole hand on it, wrapping his fingers around the long part. He wasn’t squeezing hard, but he was pressing more than I did. He brought his hand up and down, up and down. He said, “Mmmmm,” like he ate something delicious. He looked down at me and I guess I looked skeptical because he said, “If you don’t believe me, why don’t you give it a try?” He pointed to my briefs.

Before he said that erections were for adults, and I wanted to remind him but I couldn’t say that. It was embarrassing and my mouth didn’t want to make the letters. My face was hot. I knew this was secret and it was exciting to have a secret with my dad. I pulled down my underwear and kicked it off my feet. Side-by-side, our penises didn’t look the same at all. I looked back and forth from his to mine. I wanted my underwear to be back on or to put a blanket over myself, even if it was hot.

I knew what it would feel like because I touched my penis every time I peed. It didn’t feel good or bad. It didn’t feel like anything. But I tried to make my hand like his, tried to make my face like his. This was what grownups did and I could be a grownup. I was very smart. I was very special. It wasn’t working, though. I didn’t feel like mmmmmm. It wasn’t a bad feeling, but it couldn’t be the feeling that made my dad’s eyes get high and small. Mine didn’t stick out like his.

But my dad said, “Wow, Elliot. You’re really good at that. Most kids your age would be totally lost, but you’ve got the hang of it already.” He was still moving his hand on his own penis while he talksed. And his words had little catches in them, little gasps. “Elliot,” he said, “can you help me? Please?”

I couldn’t say yes or no because I couldn’t talk, but my head nodded. He took my hand and put it on himself. He didn’t grab my hand, just showed it what to do. He had one hand moving fast, and the other, the hand that was holding my hand was moving slow.

“Oh,” he said, “oh, yes.”

It felt hot and tense and I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to touch it.

“Elliot,” he said, “I love you so much,” and I could feel something move like a piece of gunk through an orange juice straw. His mouth was open but he didn’t say anything. I could see his body move in a big jerk like a roller coaster coming to a stop. And there was this stuff. Like snot, but it was white and it smelled salty. It wasn’t pee and so far pee was the only thing I knew of that comes out of a penis. I didn’t know what to think.

He lay down with me for a minute. Then he got a tissue from beside my bed and wiped up the stuff. He put his shorts back on and put the tissue in the pocket. He said, “You won’t tell anybody about this, right kiddo? I can count on you?”

I knew the answer to that question: “I won’t tell mom or anybody else.”

He held me close and we went to sleep.

* * *

Elliot opened his eyes. There was very little color left in his face and his chin was drawn to his chest. “Eighty,” he said, rating his distress without being asked.

That was considerably higher than the estimate he had provided on his initial hierarchy. It was a very long story – perhaps when he had considered it previously, he had only thought about sitting on his father’s lap to drive, feeling his father’s erection through their clothes, not the latter half in his bedroom in the middle of the night. But he hadn’t shied away from key details, and he was leaning slightly forward, so Krista asked him to tell it again, and again, and again. After the fourth telling, his SUDS rating was a thirty-five. Ideally, she wanted it to go even lower, but if Elliot told the story again, there would be no time left to process what he had just disclosed – likely his father’s first contact offense against him.

“That must have been a very difficult story to tell,” said Krista, inviting her client to talk about the experience.

“In it, I’m not…it doesn’t hurt, I’m not terrified. I’m just…” Elliot turned his head to the left, his chin wobbling slightly. “Why did I agree to keep that secret? He didn’t say he’d beat me or kill me. He just asked me to do it.”

“Your agreement would make more sense to you if your father had explicitly threatened you.”

“I gave in, right away, for no reason.”

“Elliot, when you first told me about your mother’s abuse, you mentioned that your father would sometimes keep your misbehavior secret from her, to protect you from her.”

“Yeah, but that was justified. That was keeping me safe.”

“So you had previously kept secrets with your father that protected you from harm?”

“This was different.”

“I agree. But did you know it was different at the time?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t make me agree to it. He didn’t make me do things, mostly. He’d ask me.”

“And what would you say?”

“…not no.” Elliot kneaded his hands together. “I’d say ‘yes’ or I just wouldn’t say anything.”

“Elliot, if I chose to invest my retirement savings with an agency that actively pursued and profited from subprime mortgages and illicit foreclosures, because it offered me slightly higher dividends, that would be wrong, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Now imagine an eight-year-old inherited a large sum of money. Imagine he invested with the same firm. Would you judge him similarly?”

Elliot shook his head. “He wouldn’t understand mortgages. He wouldn’t…” Elliot trailed off, looking down and to the left, realizing the answer Krista was leading him to. “He wouldn’t know what he was agreeing to.”


	5. Candyman

“It’s getting hard to sleep,” said Elliot.

“Are you having nightmares?” asked Krista.

“No, I just can’t fall asleep. It takes hours. I’m all wound up.”

“Have you been taking your quetiapine?”

“Yeah. I only forget about one day in ten. You were right about the sugar craving going away. I’m back to normal.”

“You take it in the mornings? Evenings?”

“I have to take it with food and I don’t eat breakfast, so lunch time.”

“How are you spending your days? You haven’t started working again, right?”

“I take Flipper out for walks. I’m watching Seinfeld. I do the narrative therapy stuff at night. Darlene sends me projects sometimes.” Elliot looked up and as if to head off any criticism, added, “Just white hat stuff. Cracking ransomware, mostly. And we’re playing cryptography games with each other.”

“It sounds like your SUDS level is still quite high when it’s time for you to sleep. I think you can keep doing all the same things, just move them around. Take your medication at night. Do the narrative therapy in the morning. And find something unexciting to do if you can’t sleep after thirty minutes. Don’t just lay there and get frustrated. Sudoku puzzles. Read a novel. Listen to a book on tape.”

Elliot raised an eyebrow. “Tape?”

Krista gave a tolerant kids-these-days smile before sobering and folding her arms in her lap. “Have you thought at all about what our discussion last week? About a child’s capacity to make independent decisions?”

“A little. I just focused on doing the desensitization exercise. Mr. Robot’s still hovering a lot.”

“But not interfering?”

Elliot nodded. “Uh-huh.”

That was progress, at least. And Elliot’s SUDS scores showed that he had successfully numbed the intensity of the _Kindergarten Cop_ memory. “Have you spoken with Darlene?” asked Krista.

“Yeah. We had Chinese takeout. She’s got a job offer. She’s not sure about it.”

“Have you told her what we’re meeting about?”

“No. I will. I’ve kept too many secrets from her. Just not yet.”

“We can talk about that – what you might say, what her reaction might be.” Krista hadn’t expected Elliot to disclose the abuse to Darlene yet – the mere fact that he was talking with her was a good sign – but it she wanted to plant the idea in his head, so they could address it more directly in a few weeks.

Elliot made an ineloquent noise that indicated he heard her, without expressing agreement.

“Are you ready for the next narrative on your list?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Tell me about the memory associated with the movie _Candyman_.”

* * *

We had just gotten back from the theater when Dad said, “Elliot, go get me your home-school folder.”

I handed it to him. It had _Back to the Future_ on it. He looked inside. This week, I did all my homework, didn’t get in trouble, and did good on all my tests, so there was nothing to worry about. Except dad had his eyebrows together.

He held up a photocopied notice. “It says they had a police officer talk to your class this week. What did he say?”

“She. It was a lady.”

“What did she talk about?”

“Safety.”

“It says here that she talked about what kids should do if an adult is…uh…bothering them.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what did she say?”

“Just not to talk to strangers. And good touches, bad touches, bathing suit areas. That kind of stuff.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, “You know she wasn’t talking about us, right? It might have sounded like it, but she was talking about bad people, sick people who want to hurt kids. I don’t want to hurt you. I never, ever want to see you get hurt. You know that right? If you ever feel hurt or you want us to stop, all you have to do is say ‘no’ or ‘stop’, and we’ll stop right away.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You understand all that? I need an answer, kiddo.”

“Yes.”

He messed up my hair. “I knew I could count on you.”

And then we went upstairs to my bedroom. And then we took off our clothes and did sex stuff. And then I went to sleep.

* * *

Elliot opened his eyes. “I guess…maybe a thirty?”

“Your narrative is over?”

Elliot nodded.

“That conversation, about the police officer’s presentation, must have been very tense.”

“I hadn’t really put it together, that she was talking about the things he did. She kept talking about stranger danger and telling your parents, not about if it’s your parent doing it.”

“Why did you choose this memory?”

“Because I threw up while he was-. He had to give me a bath.”

“That wasn’t in your narrative.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No.” Krista shook her head. “Elliot, what do you actually remember from this event?”

“I remember…taking my shoes off. And then, all of a sudden, I’m naked and I’m on the bed and I’m talking, but I can’t hear what I’m saying. He’s on top of me. And I don’t know how I got here and I threw up in his face.”

“And then what happened?”

“He put on shorts and he carried me to the bathroom. The lights in there were bright. I didn’t like that. I said I needed a bath but he said he had to get cleaned up too. He had vomit on him.”

“Did he get in the tub with you?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything else. Maybe I fell asleep.”

“Maybe. Would you mind if I asked Mr. Robot if he remembers this event?”

“Why would he-“ Elliot stopped, answered his own question. “You think he took over?” He shivered slightly. “Yeah, you can talk to him. I want to know what he knows.”

* * *

“ _Candyman_?” Mr. Robot’s fingers were splayed against one another as if he were holding a lit cigarette. “Not a bad movie. It had all the classic horror motifs: guy with a hook for a hand, summoning via mirrors, a shit ton of bees.”

“Do you remember the night Elliot and his father went to see it?”

The casual air instantly vanished. “Yeah. I’d say ‘what’s it to you’, but I know exactly what you’re gunning for.”

“Elliot remembers the fact that he was molested that night, but not the event itself.”

“And who’s fault is that?” Mr. Robot glowered.

“Edward Alderson’s,” answered Krista sharply, “and no one else’s.”

That took some wind out of Mr. Robot’s sails. “So, what am I here for?”

“I’d like you to fill in the blanks. Then we’ll merge the two stories and resume the desensitization procedure.”

“Are you gonna record me?”

“Audio only, and with your permission.”

Mr. Robot glanced down at the dictaphone on the table between them. Krista nodded in confirmation and pressed record.

“He sent me upstairs to get ready for bed. I knew what that meant. I stripped down and lay under the covers. I played with myself while I waited for him. I was an adult. I could do that. It was okay. A few minutes later, he came in, shut the door behind him. He bent over and kissed me on the lips. He licked my teeth. I always thought that was weird. He was kissing me and touching my face on and off while he took his clothes off. Pretty PG stuff.”

Mr. Robot met Krista’s eyes as if asking whether he should continue. She tipped her head forward in a slight nod.

“He got in bed with me, next to me so we were face to face. More touching. Not so PG. I talked to him. He always wanted me to talk, to tell him I liked it. He especially liked if I talked like an adult.”

“What did you say?”

“I don’t remember exactly. It was the same kind of stuff every time. ‘I like the way your dick feels.’ ‘You’re making me hard.’ ‘I wanna see you come.’ Just generic dirty talk.”

“How did he respond?”  
  
“He ate it up. ‘I knew you liked it, kiddo.’ He jerked me off for a little bit. Then he went down on me. It was a weird feeling. Didn’t hurt, though. Kinda nice, kinda not. Sort of like…anticipation that never went anywhere. We started out side-by-side, but then he was on top of me, rubbing our cocks together. I knew how to play it – how to touch him. He started thrusting against my stomach and I was sure if he kept up with that, he would come.”

“And then what happened?”

“Elliot wouldn’t stay put. He was supposed to be asleep. The dad was coming, pressing on his stomach, Elliot just retched. Got everywhere: Elliot, his dad, his sheets. Luckily, all three of us found this pretty gross, because it would have really sucked to turn that into a fetish.”

“Elliot said his father bathed him.”

“Yeah. That happened sometimes even when he didn’t projectile puke. There’d be sweat, semen; he probably didn’t want the kid to smell like that. I didn’t like that part. The light bulbs in the bathroom were different. Bright white. Felt like a hospital or a police station.” Mr. Robot shuddered. “This time was different because he had to get clean, too, so he got in the bath with me, but he didn’t touch me besides washing me and rubbing my back a little. I still tried to put Elliot back to sleep. Stuff like that just got him upset. It was hard, though. There wasn’t anything for me to say or do, and someone giving you a bath is a kid thing.”

“It was difficult to see yourself as an adult in that situation.”

Mr. Robot seemed to be staring at spot just to the left of Krista’s face, and a thousand yards beyond it. “He dried me off, carried me back to my bedroom, dressed me. Had me put my arms up for a shirt, step into my pajamas, like a little kid.”

“You wanted to keep being Mr. Robot, but he was treating you like Elliot.”

“Like younger than Elliot. It was humiliating.”

“I wonder if it might have also been comforting, to be taken care of. It can be difficult and confusing to feel both things at once.”

Mr. Robot sniffed dismissively. “You want a number from me?”

“Sure.”

“Zero. This is bullshit. You want more numbers? I’ve got good news, there are infinitely many. Eight hundred thousand. The square root of negative twelve. Pi over two.”

“Was this the first time your father performed fellatio on you?” Mr. Robot acknowledged that he was a part of Elliot, but he rarely extrapolated from that. She was fairly certain she had never heard him refer to Edward Alderson as his father, for example.

“Nah. He’d been sucking the kid off for a while when this happened.” Krista noticed that Mr. Robot didn’t respond directly to the reference to Edward as his father, and verbally distanced himself from Elliot.

“Why do you think you began to take Elliot’s place in the abuse?”

“That’s why I exist. To protect him from pain.”

“But you didn’t always take his place. You didn’t take his place in the _Kindergarten Cop_ story. Do you know what changed?”

Mr. Robot threw up his hands. “Sounds like your area of expertise, not mine.”

Krista pointed to herself. “Psychologist. Not psychic.”

“Too bad,” scoffed Mr. Robot. “I could see you selling advice from beyond for $4.99 a minute.”

Krista said, “I’d like to speak to Elliot now.”

* * *

Krista pressed pause on the dictaphone. “How did it feel, listening to that?”

“His voice is wrong,” said Elliot. “I know to everyone else he sounds like me, but I don’t usually hear that.”

“How did it feel to hear that narrative in your voice?”

“Really, really…” Elliot shook his head. “Bad,” he finished lamely. “I don’t want to use the highest numbers because I know things get worse. But bad. Eighty.”

Krista hadn’t been pressing for a SUDS rating, but she recorded it anyway. “Now that you’ve listened to that recording, can you remember this as something that happened to you?”

Elliot shut his eyes. There was a twitch in his right arm. “Sort of.” He suddenly inhaled sharply, held the breath for several seconds and exhaled slowly. “Let’s do it again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quetiapine is the generic name for Geodon, an atypical antipsychotic. It tends to be pretty sedating, which is a negative for people who already have no energy, but for Elliot's anxiety, it can be useful.


	6. Pulp Fiction

Elliot wasn’t actually shaking, but he certainly gave the impression of jittery energy, walking into the room with a little extra movement in each step. If he had been smiling, it might have been cheerfulness, but he wasn’t smiling as he settled down on the couch. “You’re going to ask me about _Pulp Fiction_ ,” he said. “It’s the next highest rating on the list.”

“Yes, that was my plan,” acknowledged Krista. “Would you like to do something different?”

“No,” said Elliot, “it’s fine. I just knew it was coming and I’ve been thinking about it.”

* * *

This isn’t about the day I saw _Pulp Fiction_. It was a little after that. So it was after my dad got fired from Ecorp. After he got sick but before my mom knew. He wanted to take me on a short vacation into the city. We would head in Friday and come back Saturday. Just us guys. My mom didn’t like it. They had a fight. But we still went.

“Uh, sir? Sir?” The clerk pointed to me. “He can’t be in here.” There was no need to point. Me and my dad were the only customers in the store.

“He won’t touch anything,” said my dad. He looked down at me for confirmation and I put my hands in my pockets.

“No, doesn’t matter. I could get in big trouble.”

My dad took a bill out of his wallet and held it out to the clerk. “You really think he’s better off waiting around outside alone?”

The man glanced to either side before snatching the money out of my dad’s hand. “All right,” he sighed, “but he waits up here.” The man gestured to a display of lingerie next to the register. In any other store, it would have been the least appropriate place for a kid to be, but this was a porn store and pretty much every other corner was full of images of naked people showing their privates and doing sex stuff with each other.

I walked over to the spot next to the register. My dad gave me a “Stay put and don’t touch anything,” look.

The clerk shook his head. “What’s your name, kid?”

I didn’t feel like talking, so I didn’t.

“That your dad?”

I nodded.

The clerk bent over so his head was closer to mine. He didn’t whisper; he just talked quietly. “How old are you?”

I wasn’t talking, and I was too old to show my age on my fingers.

“Are you under ten?”

I nodded. I definitely didn’t look like I was older than ten.

“You’ve seen this kind of stuff before?” He used his eyes to show he meant the whole store.

I nodded again.

“Your dad show it to you?”

I shook my head no. I lied.

The man looked back to where my dad was, on the other side of the store looking at magazines. “Does your dad ever, like, try that stuff with you for real?”

I lied with my head again.

“Are you talking to my son?!” shouted my dad. “You think I’m gonna leave him to hang around unsupervised with a perv who runs a sex shop? Come on, Elliot.”

I followed after my dad and we left the store. My dad was holding some stuff that he didn’t pay for, but he gave the guy money before, so I guessed it evened out.

We got dinner from a street vendor and we went to an arcade. I don’t remember what I got with my tickets, just that there were so many that they had to weigh them instead of counting them. And then we went to a hotel. Not a super nice one, but not filthy either. We ordered a pizza and watched HBO.

And then my dad asked me, “Remember how you had some questions about _Pulp Fiction_? About what Maynard and Zed did to Marcellus?”

I did have questions about that. I could tell it was sex by the way they were acting and the sounds they were making, but it didn’t make sense to me. Men have sex together with their hands and their mouths. I knew if it was a man and a woman, the man could put his thing in a woman’s cunt, but men don’t have one, so I was pretty sure if it was two men, they couldn’t have sex there.

My dad opened up one of the magazines and laid it on the bed. You could see a man having sex with a woman. She was standing up and bent over onto a motorcycle. The man was standing behind her. The camera was pointing up from the ground so you could see his thing go in her. “You know what this is,” said my dad. He paused and waited for me to say it.

My face burned red but I made the word come out. “Fucking.”

“Yeah,” my dad smiled and mussed my hair, “that’s right, kiddo. That’s how men and women fuck. But you wanted to know how two guys can fuck, right? Like in the movie?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know that. In the movie they pointed a gun at Marcellus and made him do it. I hoped that wasn’t a part of guys fucking.

My dad put a second magazine down on the bed. The picture it opened to had two men standing kind of like the man and woman in the first picture. One man was bent down, holding onto a table. The other man was standing behind him. The camera was higher here and it showed where the penis went in. It was so disgusting; it had never occurred to me at all. I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Ew.”

“It’s not gross,” corrected my dad. “It’s sexy. But you won’t know it’s sexy until you try it. That’s how lots of things go. It feels different than it looks.”

“There’s germs.”

“There’s germs all over your body, but you can still touch people and not get sick. You just have to wash up.”

“I don’t want you to get sick.”

“Remember condoms? I showed you one once? We don’t have to worry about making a baby, but if you want, we can use one to block any germs.”

I didn’t remember agreeing to do it, but now we were discussing how we were going to do it. I climbed off the bed and got a soda from the dresser. I stood there and drank the whole thing. Not quick either. My dad just waited. When the can was empty, I burped loudly and he laughed. I knew laughing at burps and farts was a guy thing – girls did that stuff but they didn’t think it was funny. So I knew that some people did different things with their parents than other people. “Did you do guy stuff with your dad?” I asked.

My dad looked small. “No,” he said. “Remember how I told you my dad didn’t live with me very much.”

“Because he was in jail.” I had been told a little about my grandfather, mainly that he was a thief.

“Yeah, sometimes he was in jail. And sometimes he just had other places to be. It made me sad that he wasn’t around more, made me feel like I wasn’t special enough. But I’m not gonna let that happen to you. Even if I’m not around anymore, it’ll be because I couldn’t stay, not because I chose to leave.” He looked right at me. “I love you so much, Elliot. I love you more than anyone else.”

That was ambiguity, that last sentence. It could mean my dad loves me more than he loves anyone else; he loves me the most. That might be true. He loved Darlene, but she was too little to be his friend like I was. And if he loved my mom, it was only a little bit. So I think it could be that he loves me most. But it could also mean that he loves more than any other person loves me. And that might be true too. I couldn’t think of anyone in the world who might love me more than my dad did. That thought made me sad because my dad was going to die and then there would be no one left who loved me that much. I climbed back onto the bed and pushed my body up between my dad’s arms so he was hugging me. He kissed the top of my head.

“You are strong and smart and brave, kiddo. You’re gonna be okay.” His voice had that creaky, watery sound, like he was trying not to cry.

But now I was back on the bed and I could see the magazine pictures again and I knew what my dad wanted to do with me. It still looked disgusting and painful but my dad was sad because his dad didn’t love him and he was going to die and there wouldn’t be anybody left who loved me as much as he did. I wanted to help. Me, not Mr. Robot. So I turned over and started undoing his belt. This would make him happy. It always made him happy. I pulled down the zipper and felt inside his underwear for his penis. It wasn’t very hard, but I knew how to fix that. I rubbed it and kissed it and licked up the sides.

“Elliot,” whispered my dad. “You just wanted to-?” His voice caught and he said, “Thank you.”

He was hard by then and I knew how to do it. I couldn’t get his whole thing in my mouth, like he did for mine, but I could get the top part in and rub the rest with my hands.

“Oh kiddo,” said my dad, “that feels so good. I hope you feel this good when I go down on you.”

It took a long time. He started twitching his butt and his legs which pushed more of his penis into my mouth. I didn’t like that because there wasn’t room, so I had to back my head up a little, which was hard because I was already holding myself up on my elbows.

“Do want it,” asked my dad, “in your mouth? On your face?”

I couldn’t answer because my mouth was full, but I wouldn’t have said anything anyway. It was too embarrassing to talk about. I just kept doing the thing and going faster and faster because I knew that was how my dad liked it when he was about to come.

“Oh!” yelled my dad. It scared me because we usually had to be quiet, but then I remembered we were in a hotel and nobody would catch us. “Oh! Oh! Elliot!” And then I felt the stuff move and tasted it and it was hard to swallow because it was thick and gooey like snot but I knew I could breathe if I just made myself do it. He liked it that way. He was going to die and I wanted him to be happy first. Happy with me.

He hugged me under the blankets and fell asleep for a little bit.

* * *

Elliot opened his eyes, then immediately raised his hood and brought both hands to his face. “We did other stuff, but that was the important thing.”

His body was pressed forcefully back into the chair and Krista was quite sure that if he would have turned invisible if he could. “Did your father attempt anal penetration that weekend?” With the pornographic magazines, Krista had thought that was the direction the story was going.

“No,” mumbled Elliot. “I think he planned to but chickened out.”

Or, having already orgasmed, his motivation to anally rape his son was lessened. Regardless, the story was complete and could be repeated. Elliot’s SUDS rating started at a ninety, but after three retellings, it had only fallen to an eighty, and even that, Krista suspected, was more due to a desire to comply with the expectations of therapy than actual improvement.

“Right now,” asked Krista, “are you worried about what I’ll think of you?”

“You’re gonna say that it’s not my fault, even though I initiated it and acted seductive.”

It was progress that Elliot was at least predicting her objections, even if he hadn’t yet internalized them. “And you disagree?”

“I went to him and took his dick out. That’s not mixed signals.”

“Elliot, since you told this story, you’ve looked ashamed. Do you feel this is a story about you doing something wrong?”

“I wanted to be close to him so badly. Nothing else mattered. I wouldn’t let anyone help. I wouldn’t let Mr. Robot step in. I wouldn’t talk to the cashier at the store.”

“And you think that wanting closeness with your dying father is something to be ashamed of?”

“The way I did it.”

Krista sighed and rested her pen in her lap. “How did you know he would like that?”

“Who doesn’t?” Elliot’s voice held the barest twinge of irony, the only color in his presentation since he’d stopped recounting the story.

“Most people enjoy oral sex. But most eight-year-olds don’t know that fact. How did you know?”

“You’re going to say he groomed me into it.”

“Do you believe that?”

“At that moment, I decided to do it. How fucking sick is that? I decided to blow my own dad. I had other options. I wasn’t stupid. I could have let Mr. Robot take over. I could have called my mom or run out of the hotel or found a cop or apparently a socially responsible porn store clerk!”

“Looking back,” Krista said carefully, “you can’t see why you wouldn’t have taken those other options if you hadn’t genuinely wanted to perform oral sex on your father.” There were too many negatives in that sentence. Her graduate school supervisor would have corrected her. But it was important that she convey to Elliot that he was viewing the situation with hindsight, judging the past from the security and wisdom of the present.

Elliot chose not to respond to that point. Instead, he asked, “Why don’t I feel any better? The other times I felt better.”

“Repeating narratives works best on high-energy emotions, like fear. Your body can’t stay in a fight-or-flight state indefinitely – uses too much energy. So apart from getting used to the stimuli, you’ll eventually calm down through exhaustion. You can get desensitized to guilt or embarrassment or shame through repetition, but you don’t get the boost from exhaustion. And there’s…” Krista paused. “Do you _want_ the feeling of shame to go away?”

Elliot didn’t respond, obviously trying to imagine what it would be like to remember that event without the feeling that he had done a disgraceful, terrible act. He managed to say, “I don’t know,” without visibly moving his lips.

“Shame is a feeling that tells you to hide. The way to counteract it is to do the opposite. When you’re ready, I can help you do that. You can tell your secret to others who’ve had the same experience. You can also tell the people who care about you.”

Elliot’s mouth hung open slightly. He still looked as though he were attempting to merge with the furniture. “No,” he mumbled, “no thanks.”

“I understand,” said Krista. “But we need to agree on your homework for this week. I don’t think listening to this narrative will be helpful. What I’d like you to do instead is listen to the previous ones with fewer cues grounding you to the present. You can skip the mints and shut your eyes. If you can convince Mr. Robot to listen with you, that would be good as well. Can you do that?”

Elliot nodded. His eyes darted back and forth from Krista to the door.

“Let’s end this session a few minutes early,” she said. “And Elliot? I know you and I don’t agree on your responsibility for what happened, but please don’t punish yourself. If you deserve to be punished, you’ll deserve it just as much three months from now, so why not wait?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Misc clarification: (1) Krista is a little out of character. In the show, she talks less and she's less directive, probably because the audience wants to hear Elliot talk more. In reality, there are different therapeutic styles - some require more talking, some require less - and they can be applied differently based on the needs of the patient. (2) Elliot's memories are told in _way_ more detail than is realistic. People don't normally remember exact quotes from decades prior. That's a stylistic choice.


	7. Malice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this fic is upsetting for a lot of people, so FYI, this is probably the most graphic chapter. Know that it gets better from here.

“I’d like to hear how your week went.” Krista folded her hands. Elliot had returned to her office on-time, as scheduled. For all the many ways he was unreliable, he was surprisingly consistent and punctual.

“I did my homework.”

“That’s good. I want to hear about that. I’d like to hear about everything else, too. When you left last week, you were feeling very bad about yourself.”

“When I left, I took the subway for a while. I ended up out at Coney Island. I don’t know what I was going to do. Then Darlene called. I told you she’s looking at this job and she asked me to vet some people before she can think about signing on with them.”

“Were you able to help her?”

“Yeah.”

“And how did that affect your mood?”

“It didn’t really fix anything, but it made me stop thinking about it for a while. That’s kind of all I did this week was try not to think about it.”

“What has Mr. Robot been doing?”

“He kept looking up these local news articles about dumb shit kids have done, like kids who played with matches and burned down a building, or kids who played with guns and shot somebody, and constantly reading them to me. He wouldn’t shut up.”

Krista suppressed a smile. Mr. Robot apparently had a clever, if morbid, approach to convincing Elliot that an eight-year-old child could not bear the same moral responsibility as an adult.

“So,” said Elliot, “do we have to fix the thing from last week or do we keep going?”

The fundamental axiom that underlay narrative therapy was, “Avoid avoiding.” Avoidance only made trauma memories more upsetting. But the Elliot who blamed himself for not confiding in an ostensibly responsible porn store employee (with no reason to trust the man, no time to process or prepare, in a one-minute conversation, with his father only a few yards away), was not yet capable of grappling with the idea that his actions on the trip were not borne out of base, taboo impulses, but rather life experiences that had taught him he was most valuable to his father as a source of sexual gratification.

“It’s up to you,” said Krista, “but my recommendation would be that we keep going. There’s only two more memories on your list: _Alien 3_ and _Malice_.”

“We can do _Malice_. It’s first anyway.”

* * *

Mr. Robot takes over for me sometimes. He’s bigger than me, so his body and dad’s body match better. He says it doesn’t hurt him and he doesn’t feel like he can’t breathe. Besides, he has an adult penis, not like mine. His penis works like dad’s. It gets hard and it gets a lot bigger. It can finish and sneeze out that gooey stuff.

Mine isn’t like that. It’s much smaller. Not just because I’m shorter, but small even for that. I haven’t measured, but I’m pretty sure dad’s penis is more than twice as long as mine, and he’s not twice as tall as me. My dad says it will grow a lot in a few years.

I don’t really care.

My penis doesn’t get hard the same way theirs do. It will a little bit, sometimes, when dad is doing guy stuff, but it doesn’t get a lot bigger, and there are times when it doesn’t get hard at all. And it never finishes. Dad says it’s okay because even if my body and his body are different, we can still feel good together.

Mr. Robot says it’s not fair for adults and kids to do guy stuff together because kid bodies don’t feel good the way adult bodies do.

That’s why Mr. Robot takes over for me sometimes. Dad doesn’t notice when we change places, which makes me sad, so we don’t do it always.

We’re swapped out right now. I’m under my bed with my eyes shut and my fingers in my ears. I’m trying to picture in my head exactly how I would write a program in to sort a list of numbers from lowest to highest. Mr. Robot is on the bed with dad, but I’m not thinking about that. I’m thinking about the easy way to do it – repeated commands that say to start with X=1 and evaluate “IF nx > nx+1 THEN move nx+1 up one rank” and then repeat when X is 2 and 3 and so on, and then do the whole thing over and over again. I think there’s a more efficient way to do it, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

The bed is moving a lot. Up and down.

I could tell the program to first split the numbers into high and low groups, then the ranking wouldn’t have to sift through so much junk. That would be easy, right? Make it calculate the average and then compare each number to the average. And then it would make two sets, sort each of them, and then stick one after the other.

My dad says, “Oh, Elliot, oh. Oh, yeah. You’re so good. So, so, so-” Then he makes a sound like the way a wind-up car feels when you let the spring go.

Why stop at two sets, though? I could make three or four or five. As many as I want, really. What if I made a bunch of chunks of numbers that are close together and moved the chunks around? That would mean that if the program knew a number was greater than the highest number in the chunk, it could skip the value all the way to the end of the chunk instead of comparing it to every number inside. But I’d have to find a way to make sure that the new number didn’t belong inside the chunk. But if I made as many chunks as I had numbers, I’d be back to the original problem. It wouldn’t be any more efficient.

Mr. Robot goes with my dad to the bathroom to get cleaned up.

That’s the worst part. I don’t like being naked with people. Mr. Robot doesn’t either. It’s too bright in the bathroom and there’s no blankets to be under. They take a long time in the bathroom.

By the time my dad comes back from the bathroom, I’ve changed places with Mr. Robot. I’ve climbed back on top of my bed and he’s hidden away. The sheets are different. I’m wearing clean pajamas now. My dad lays down beside me in the bed. He touches my hair and says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you okay? I need you to be okay.”

Ambiguity. ‘I need you to be okay’ could mean that dad needs for me to be okay, but it could also mean that for dad to be okay, he needs me.

I don’t know which one I want it to be. I say, “Good night.”

Dad leaves after a little while, maybe to go back to his bed. My eyes are shut and I’m quiet. He probably thinks I’m asleep. I can hear the door to his bedroom open and shut. Now Mr. Robot lies behind me on the bed. I’m lying on my side and so is he, which means my shoulders are in between his. But he’s bending his legs toward the wall, so his penis isn’t right next to me. Even if it was, it wouldn’t be hard. He puts his arm over me and he rolls a little from side to side. It’s like I’m a baby and he’s rocking me. I didn’t like that at first. I’m too old to be rocked like a baby. But Mr. Robot says that if I’m a kid who has to do adult stuff, I can also be a kid who does baby stuff. It cancels out.

Mr. Robot rocks me until I fall asleep.

* * *

Elliot opened his eyes. “Sixty,” he said, “but I know you have to talk to Mr. Robot.”

* * *

“ _Malice_ was a shitty movie.” Mr. Robot leaned back against the sofa, arms splayed out in either direction. “Had Alec Baldwin in it and he’s always a douche.”

“Did you see it in the theater with your father?”

“Yeah. There must’ve been nothing better that week.”

“And what happened afterward?”

“He fucked me.” Mr. Robot’s voice was deliberately casual, as if he had rehearsed. Maybe he had.

“Are you referring to molestation in general, or to anal sex in particular?” Krista’s practice was to invite her clients to use the terms they felt most comfortable with. This made it easier for them to say what they needed to say, but sometimes meant she had to ask for clarification as to whether ‘hooked up’ meant sex, ‘crotch’ meant vagina, or – as in this case – ‘fucking’ meant all sexual behavior or just intercourse.

“Don’t play dumb. Where did you think this was going?” asked Mr. Robot, perplexed at her ignorance. “After that stuff Elliot told you last week about _Pulp Fiction_ , you really thought he was gonna give up?”

“I always hope.”

“Optimism,” he snorted. “The last refuge of the terminally disappointed.”

“Can you tell me in more detail what happened?”

Mr. Robot pulled an annoyed, impatient face, but he said, “It started out like usual: Naked, kissing, touching. A little bit of jerking each other. A little bit of speaking into the mic. Then he started talking about fucking – that it wasn’t like in _Pulp Fiction_ , that the guy hated it because the other guys were making him do it, but if you wanted it, it was fun.”

“And then what?”

“He held my legs up and he started touching my asshole, trying to stretch me out. It felt cold. Probably lube. He looked…bug-eyed, but not the way Elliot does. More like somebody on cocaine looks, right? And I’m saying it feels weird and I want to go back to the other stuff we were doing and I liked that other stuff. I don’t know how long it went on before he put a pillow on me – not over my whole face, just my mouth and down over my chest. I didn’t know what the hell he was doing until he started to push in and I yelled into the pillow.”

“What were you feeling at that moment?”

“It fucking hurt. And look, I don’t judge what people want to do in their own bedrooms, but it just doesn’t work the way pussy does. It’s not built that way. It’s an exit, not an entrance.”

Krista noted that ‘hurt’ was the closest Mr. Robot came to describing his feelings. “I can imagine the physical pain was awful. Were you frightened?”

“I wanted it to stop. And I said so.”

“You told your father to stop.” Some children never protested; some were vocal from the start. Krista had been genuinely unsure whether Elliot had ever expressed reluctance.

“I- look, it’s really fucking hard to make your lungs work when you’re getting reamed up the ass. And the pillow was there so the only way I could talk was to look to the side. So I probably didn’t say ‘stop’. It was closer to ‘sssst’. But he wasn’t, he wasn’t paying attention. And I said ‘no no no no no’. It was really quiet because I couldn’t catch my breath. But I was saying it and he wasn’t stopping.”

“He had promised, hadn’t he, to stop if you asked him to?” This question seemed cruel, but it was important that they grapple with the depth of Edward Alderson’s betrayal, that they put his actions in context of his words and vice versa.

“Promises aren’t worth shit,” said Mr. Robot. “I kept saying no and he kept…goddamn…” Mr. Robot inhaled sharply and swallowed. “And then he was done and it was like he was a different fucking person. There was blood on his dick. On the condom on his dick. He wore a condom. And on the sheets. And on me. And he kept saying he was sorry. The blood, it wasn’t enough to go the hospital, but it was more than just a scraped knee. He kept saying sorry, sorry, sorry. He gave me a bath, carried me and dressed me like a little kid again. He said, ‘You don’t have to go to school tomorrow. I’ll tell mom you’re sick. You can rest, come with me to the shop, play Lemmings on the computer, okay?’ And it hurt. It hurt if I moved and it hurt if I stood still. He changed the sheets. He must have thrown them out because there’s no way that came clean in the wash.”

Mr. Robot sniffed the air. “I didn’t want to let Elliot back on top. I wanted to stay until…until…I don’t know. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t as strong back then. So I kept Elliot out until he and his bed were clean.”

“I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

“Don’t pity me!” snapped Mr. Robot.

“I admire you,” said Krista. “You came through this horrible experience and you were still able to think about Elliot’s well-being. Just like right now, you don’t want to think about this, you don’t want to tell me this, but you believe it will help Elliot, so you’re here, talking to me anyway.”

“He always believed – _we_ always believed – that if we pulled the emergency brake, he would stop.”

“You had shown him through your behavior that you were uncomfortable, but as long as you didn’t tell him ‘no’, you wouldn’t have to face the possibility that he really was going to put his desires over your needs.”

There was a long silence. Then, “Why do I look like him?” asked Mr. Robot.

“Elliot told me that, to him, you look like his father. Is that what you mean?”

In what was probably the first time Krista had ever seen him avoid a chance to speak, Mr. Robot only nodded. 

“I don’t know. I have a guess.” Krista paused to gather her thoughts. “The reason abuse by one’s parents is so traumatic is not only the abuse itself, but also the person doing it, that someone who’s supposed to protect you and meet your needs is actively harming you. What makes it even trickier is that very few abusive parents are strictly, constantly monsters. If they never did anything but hurt, the child would eventually realize that they’re a bad person. But most abusive parents do kind and nurturing things as well. Children have a hard time with nuance, so it’s very difficult for them to cope with the fact that the same parent who feeds them, reads to them, protects them, loves them also abuses them. I think when Elliot was imagining an adult to absorb the abuse for him, he gave that persona an additional responsibility, to resolve this conflict by creating a version of his father who only acts as a father should.”

Mr. Robot made a sound that was very nearly a laugh, but was completely devoid of humor. “You know I can hear what he says, right? I heard him tell you that I cuddled him after his dad left. But you know what you would have seen if you looked back in time, right? Just some kid with a bloody ass rocking himself to sleep alone in his bed.”


	8. Alien 3

Krista looked at Elliot’s SUDS record. Last week’s memory had been particularly upsetting, so she was pleased to see he had attempted listening to the recording every day in between, even if he’d been unable to complete the task on one day, and his ending SUDS level was still higher than ideal.

“Mr. Robot listened with me,” said Elliot. “He’s not here right now. He’s actually been gone a lot this week.”

“Have you been losing time?”

“No.” Elliot shook his head. “Before, he wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t leave me alone. Now he’s just…he’s just quiet and sad.”

“And how have you been feeling?”

“It feels like withdrawing from morphine.”

“Opiate withdrawal is very jittery, anxious. There’s too much energy.” said Krista. “You’re describing Mr. Robot’s mood as listless, too little energy.”

Elliot shrugged.

“You’re the same person,” said Krista. “You’re one person who has complicated feelings about a complicated situation.”

“I know that.”

“I’d like to try something. When you recount your last narrative, don’t talk about Mr. Robot like he’s separate from you, like his experiences aren’t your own. Instead, you might say, ‘I imagined I was an adult’ or ‘I wished that someone would protect me in this way’. Do you think you could try that?”

Elliot’s eyes were turned slightly down, his mouth hanging open and his brow furrowed. “Yeah,” he finally said, “yeah, I think I can.”

* * *

This was the day after _Malice_. I heard my dad telling my mom that I was sick and her not believing it and him saying I threw up and I had a fever. I thought she still didn’t believe it, but she gave in when he said he would watch me all day. Darlene went to Pre-K and daycare and my mom went to work.

My dad came up to my room and said he’d make me scrambled eggs for breakfast.

“I’m not hungry.” I wasn’t. I had a really bad stomachache and my butt still hurt. And I knew if I ate, I’d have to go to the bathroom eventually, and that meant poop going past the spot where I had an open cut and that was too disgusting to think about.

“How about just some toast? Or I could make you pancakes?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You don’t have to get dressed like for school, but I need you to put on long sleeves and shoes before we head over to the shop. It’s cold today.”

“I’m not hungry.”

My dad sighed. “That one wasn’t food, Elliot.” He sat down on the floor of my bedroom with his back on my bed, facing away from me. “I really am sorry, kiddo. It’s just, I love you and I want to show you how much I love you and sometimes I make mistakes. I made a mistake last night. I should have waited and gone slower and been more careful.”

“You didn’t stop.”

“You’re right. I didn’t. I should have. I feel really terrible, Elliot.”

In my head, I said, ‘Not as bad as me,’ but out loud I said, “It hurt.”

“I know,” said my dad. He really sounded sad and sorry. “I know. And I’m gonna make it up to you. I only have to go into the shop for an hour or two today. We can go see a movie, go to the Red Hen diner. That’s your favorite, right?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Okay.” My dad stood up. “I’m going to go get ready for work. All you gotta do is get dressed, okay kiddo?”

I took a very long time to get up, but I did because I didn’t want my dad to decide I wasn’t going to dress myself and he had to do it for me. We didn’t talk at all driving to the Mr. Robot store. At least, not to each other. My dad talked a bit as he fiddled with the radio. He said he was trying to find Dr. Demento for me, but that wasn’t on weekdays, so I guess he just wanted me to see him try. I talked to Mr. Robot in my head – I mean I imagined talking to someone who would protect me – about how I didn’t like it when my dad talked and said words that meant two things, like love.

We parked in the back, to save the spots out front for customers, but I didn’t get out of the car. I said, “Do you love mom?” I didn’t know why I asked that. I knew it was a test, but I don’t know what I was trying to get him to say or not say. Maybe trying to see if he would be honest.

My dad paused in taking off his seatbelt, his hand stuck in the air. “Do I love…” he repeated. Then he said, “Your mom and I together, we made you and Darlene, and I love the two of you so much, so I’ll always be glad that happened.”

“How much do you love me?” I knew that was a bratty question, but I really wanted the answer.

“Infinity,” said my dad.

“That’s not a real number.” I understood big numbers just fine, but theoretical ones were a sticking point.

My dad thought for a moment. “There are eight letters in ‘I love you’, so let’s call that one byte. Remember that gigabyte hard drive I showed you? That holds a trillion bytes. And how many of those hard drives do you think you could fit in your backpack?”

“Maybe…twenty?”

“So that’s twenty trillion in a backpack. And how many backpacks would fit in your bedroom?”

I tried to imagine how they would be stacked. “Two thousand?” I wasn’t very confident in my guess.

“Okay, we’re up to forty quadrillion. How many of your bedroom would fit in our house?”

“Fifteen?”

“And that brings the total to six hundred quadrillion. But that’s not how much I love you. That’s just a good start.”

I tried to imagine the words ‘I love you’ on a computer screen, a giant screen with tiny font, scrolling very fast so it could show me all six hundred quadrillion bytes. I didn’t have to actually work out the math to know that the scrolling display would take a very long time. “How much do you love Darlene?”

“More than six hundred quadrillion, just like I love you.”

My heart felt funny, like the different muscles and valves forgot how to work together and the blood was getting stuck and going backwards and trying to get out. I spit out my question before I could think about it too much. “Do you love Darlene the same way you love me?”

“Which way?” asked my dad. “Up? Left? East? North?”

“No!” I snapped. I knew what I wanted to ask but I couldn’t say the words. I had spent a long time not saying them and I had gotten very good at not saying them.

“I didn’t mean to tease you, Elliot,” said my dad. “You’re special to me. Never think you’re not.”

My dad had said we could go to the movies but he had a lot of repairs and I didn’t want to go anywhere anyway, so I watched _Alien 3_ on a VCR in the backroom. It’s all about people who get pregnant with alien monsters when they don’t want to. If a man does sex with a female, she can get pregnant. If it didn’t fit in me, it really wouldn’t fit in Darlene.

I got really hungry but I still didn’t want to eat.

We went home for dinner. I ate some toast so my mom didn’t make me eat other food.

The next day was Saturday. My mom was in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. I knew I had to talk but I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I promised I wouldn’t. But I had an idea and I imagined Mr. Robot told it to me. I imagined he said if everyone else was going to use ambiguity, I could too. If I said words that meant two things, I wasn’t breaking my promise because maybe I meant the other thing.

“What are you just standing there for?” asked my mom. “You’re staring like a goblin. It’s rude.”

I opened my mouth to talk but I couldn’t. It was the worst stomachache I ever had. I felt like someone had a hand in me, squeezing my lungs and my tongue felt too big in my mouth. But I imagined I was Mr. Robot and I said, “Dad’s sick.”

My mom rolled her eyes. “No, he’s not. He’s just lazy.”

“Dad’s really sick,” I said, “and he doesn’t want to get help.” I could say the words because I was acting like Mr. Robot.

“What does that mean?” My mom grabbed my face. I was so scared that my face was sweaty, so she let go and wiped her hand on a kitchen towel. “Ugh,” she said. “Maybe you are sick.” She looked me in the eye. “Don’t play games, Elliot. What do you mean?”

Maybe because Mr. Robot said it first, I could say it again. “Dad’s sick. And he doesn’t want to fix it.”

I was scared my mom would get me with her cigarette, but she just put it out and said, “Go to your room.”

I went upstairs to my room and she went downstairs, to the basement where my dad was. I lay down on my bed and used my pillow to cover my ears because they were yelling now, both of them. I couldn’t tell what they were saying and I didn’t want to. Something terrible was going to happen, was happening. Every part of me felt twisted up and bad. I felt like tired and like I would never sleep again. I already wanted to take it back. I imagined my mouth as a vacuum, sucking my words back into me, but then I imagined the sound waves expanding outward at Mach 1 and I knew there was no vacuum that could ever catch them.

I heard a crashing sound that was probably a stack of very expensive desktop computer components, and then grown-up feet on stairs – definitely not Darlene.

“How could you do this to me?” It was my dad’s voice. It wasn’t sad and sorry like yesterday. It was angry. It was angry at me.

I didn’t say anything for a long time. I was buffering while I put the words together in my head. Then I said, “I didn’t want you to fuck Darlene.” I didn’t like saying that. I didn’t like saying ‘fuck’. I really didn’t like saying ‘fuck Darlene’.

“Why would you-“ My dad threw up his hands. “I’m not going to- How could you- Why on earth would you think I would ever do that?”

“You said you love her like you love me.” When I talk, barely any sound comes out, but at least there’s no words I can’t say this time.

“ _Love_ ,” said my dad, “I said _love_. Love and sex are two different things! I love hash browns; I don’t fuck them. I love your sister, that doesn’t mean- Elliot, I’ve never done any of that stuff with her. Is that what you really thought? And now you’ve gone and told your mom.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sure if what I did was wrong, but it felt wrong. I felt wrong and apologizing felt like the right thing to do.

I got up and stepped forward to hug my dad, but he took a step back and held his hands out in front of him, like he was showing a police officer that he didn’t have a gun. “No,” he said, “you’re not getting it, Elliot. We can’t touch anymore. Ever.’’ He shook his head. He was disappointed in me. He hated me. I betrayed him.

My mom was in the hallway, behind my dad. “What are you doing in his room?” she snapped.

“We’re just having a goddamn conversation,” yelled my dad, “or is that a crime now?!”

My mom looked angry. She always looked angry, but right then she looked so mad I thought if she had a gun, she would have shot somebody. She kept looking right at my dad but she talked to me. She said, “Elliot, watch your sister. Your father and I are going for a drive.”

My dad followed my mom out of the room and I heard the car start. My stomach hurt. My butt still hurt. I messed it all up because I thought I knew what the words meant and I didn’t. Guy stuff was only ever just for me and my dad. But I told my mom and now my dad would be mad at me until he died. My mom would be mean to my dad until he died. Maybe he would die in jail. I would never be happy with my dad again. Forever was like infinity. You couldn’t just think it. You had to really try hard to make your brain imagine it. Not just a whole bunch of minutes or days or years, but all of them. No matter how many years, my dad would never have special time with me and I would never make him happy again.

Except.

Except my dad was a liar. He said he would never hurt me, and he did. He said he would stop if I asked, and he didn’t. How was I supposed to know he didn’t do stuff to Darlene? And he said sorry for doing it fast and not being careful, but not for doing it at all. He said he should have done it slower, but I wanted him to not do it at all. My stomach hurt so bad I thought somebody punched me.

“Ellllllliot!” sang Darlene. She shouted everything like it was a song, like she was in a kids’ movie. “It’s snowing! We gotta make a snowwwmannn!”

I did not want to make a snowman. I did not want to leave my room. I did not want to move at all. But I could hear Darlene trying to get her boots out of the hall closet and I knew she’d need help with the ties. So I pretended to be a grownup, pretended to be Mr. Robot, because adults have to get stuff done even when they feel sick. And I kept pretending while we went outside and made a snowman of Kevin McAllister from _Home Alone_.

I kept pretending while we went inside to get a camera to take a picture. And I was still pretending when I heard my dad come home. And I couldn’t think and I didn’t know what to do and I knew I didn’t want him to see Darlene, so I pushed her in my closet and said, ‘Shhh’. And I was pretending I was big when he came in the room and I grabbed my bat. And I still hurt from last night. And he was mad at me and he was a liar. An adult would say what he meant, say all the words, but I didn’t know what to say so I showed it with my hands and started swinging the bat and making things break. And I was so mad all the time. And my dad was talking but I couldn’t hear him. I could only hear my words and my bat. And I smashed the window and my brain knew that if everything was ruined and my dad was going to die, then I might as well die too.

* * *

Elliot opened his eyes. “One hundred.”


	9. Naming the Alien

Krista did not like horror movies, or even action movies, because she felt the characters’ injury or death too keenly. So, she had never seen _Alien_ or its sequels, but it had become such an established point of pop culture reference that she, like most adults, had a sense of the main themes. She remembered reading some media critic article arguing that the franchise was, both symbolically and viscerally, about rape. The alien that stalked the space station violently penetrated its victims, injecting them with its young, essentially sexually assaulting and impregnating them.

The movie was hardly the most important element in Elliot’s narrative, but it stuck out to Krista as the turning point when Elliot decided he had to act to protect his sister. In the narrative, the movie caused him to think about the harm of non-consensual sex, but it seemed unlikely that an eight-year-old, even one as bright as Elliot, had noticed the metaphor, although it was possible that he was emotionally affected by the imagery even if he wasn’t intellectually aware of it.

She made a mental note of the issue and set it aside to focus on the suffering patient seated in front of her. After whispering, “One hundred,” Elliot had begun shaking and twitching, breaths rapid and shallow, swallowing air in a self-evident panic attack.

“Elliot,” Krista said calmly, “listen to the sound of my voice. You’re very distressed, but you’re not in any danger. It’s just an emotion. It will pass.”

Elliot’s eyes were wide and fixed on a point in the middle distance. He glanced at Krista, making momentary eye contact before looking away again.

“Elliot!” Krista said sharply. “What does it mean to wash eCoin?”

He blinked several times at least acknowledging her presence. “Huh?”

“I heard it on the news. They said that stolen eCoin was washed. I don’t know what that means. Explain it to me.”

Elliot seemed confused, which was a step above terrified. “It’s…it’s just a way of overwriting the public ledger that tracks the coin’s transaction history.”

“And how do people do that?”

“Did you ever do a chain letter? A physical one, not on email. You get a postcard with six names. You send postcards to all six. Then you put your name on a postcard along with the top five names and send it along. They names that started on the post card all get bumped down a level and the sixth one gets deleted. It’s like that. The system only tracks the X most recent transactions, so you pass the money back and forth between different wallets until the move you want to hide gets bumped off the list.” Elliot looked down at himself, apparently registering that his shaking had stopped. “How long have you been holding onto that one?”

“A couple of months. But a I really did want to know.”

“I don’t think I can tell that story again.”

“I can see why you feel that way, like you’ve used all your energy and you can’t do one more thing, and the choice is yours whether to continue. But throughout this process, you’ve seen that retelling that narrative gets easier each time.”

“He hated me.”

“He said very angry, hurtful things to you.” Krista wanted to acknowledge Elliot’s perceptions without initiating a debate as to their validity. There were so many elements of the narrative that deserved discussion: the equating of love and sex, the possibility that Edward might have abused Darlene as well, the stress of divulging to a cold, vicious mother, the lack of caretaking and comfort from adults following his disclosure, his father’s blaming response, the feelings of anger and fear toward his father that had likely been simmering for a very long time, the sadly realistic sense that he and his father would be unable to repair their relationship before his father’s death, his belief that he would never be loved again and subsequent suicide attempt. If they delved into any of these topics, Elliot would use it as an excuse to avoid repeating the narrative.

Elliot took a slow, loud breath. “I’m going crazy. I’m never going to be sane again.”

“You feel out of control. It seems like your mind is broken. But I’ve done this with hundreds of patients, many of whom have expressed a fear of going crazy, and not one of them did.”

“How many of your patients have done what I’ve done?”

“Elliot, I want you to trust me. You can’t be so upset that you break your mind permanently. It’s just not possible, the same way it’s not possible for you to be so sad that you melt, or so angry you literally explode.” Fears of going crazy, having a breakdown, or somehow causing permanent brain damage were common among people facing very painful emotions, but Krista was telling the truth. Awful feelings didn’t damage the mind.

Elliot took another deep breath. “If I go crazy,” he said, “you have to take care of my dog.” And then he told the story again. This time he started crying as he relayed the terrible tension of telling his mother. He ignored the tears and allowed them to fall unimpeded. He kept talking even as the swallowed sobs gave way to hiccups. He told the story again, this time seemingly trying to summon up anger toward his father, emphasizing the lingering pain from the previous night’s rape and approaching, however gingerly, the possibility that his father was to blame for teaching his son that love, even familial love, meant sex. He told the story again, like an exhausted runner staggering through the last mile of a marathon, his recitation expressing not only his own fatigue but that of his childhood self, forced to handle one stressor after another without parental care or support. He told the story a last time and found his voice getting curiously high, even though it retained the low rumble that marked an adult male. His consonants were less crisp and he was somehow sitting such that he had to look up at Krista, as though he were again a child made to feel as though he were responsible for the consequences incurred by a dying man for his own decisions.

“Forty,” said Elliot wearily, obviously expecting that he would be asked to tell the story again.

“I’m very proud of you, Elliot.” Krista had been saving that one too, just as much as the eCoin question. She had been proud of him before this for what he had accomplished in therapy, but now was when he needed to hear it.

“I have to listen to this all week, don’t I?”

“You don’t have to, but I hope you will. I don’t want you to lose the progress you’ve made.”

“Do you think he knew?”

_He_ was obviously Edward Alderson, but there were too many possible predicates to that sentence for Krista to begin to guess. “Do I think he knew what?” she asked instead.

“What it would do to me.”

There was a long, technically correct answer that Edward, like most adults alive at the time, was aware of the consensus that sexual abuse is psychologically harmful, but had probably managed to convince himself that the experts were wrong, or that their conclusions did not apply in this particular case, but she wasn’t sure that Elliot was seeking factual information at the moment. “What would it mean to you if he knew the consequences of his actions?”

“Then he was lying every time he said he wanted me to be happy, every time he said he loved me.”

“And what would it mean to you if he believed that you would be okay?”

“Then he was as crazy as I am.” Elliot looked up as if startled, meeting Krista’s eyes. “Am I…am I like him? Is that how it works?”

“No, Elliot, that’s not how it works. Childhood sexual abuse does not make you into an abuser. Most child molesters were not molested as children, and most abuse victims do not grow up to be abusers. Choosing to offend against children is the only thing that makes you an abuser.”

“So my dad wasn’t…”

“I don’t know. I doubt we’ll ever know. But whether he was or not, he had a choice in how he treated you.”

Elliot nodded, looking very slightly relieved. “After that day,” he said, “my dad wasn’t allowed to be alone with me. He spent most of his time in the basement, in his workshop where he worked on computers. He barely talked to me. And then one day my mom had to cover a late shift at work, so she called Angela’s dad – well, her step-dad – and said my dad was too sick from the cancer to watch me and Darlene, so he came over to babysit. She didn’t tell him the real reason. After she left, my dad came up from the basement, saying he was feeling better. He took me to the movies. He tried to apologize. I wouldn’t let him. And then there was a blood clot. He never regained consciousness.”

Krista mentally filed away Elliot’s label of Angela’s parent as “step-dad”. Not important right now. “Did your mother or father ever talk with you directly about what had happened, or why your father was forbidden to be alone with you?”

Elliot shook his head. “Just what I said in the story.”

“I imagine it hurt, feeling as though he was rejecting you.”

“I pushed him away. I mean, I literally jumped out of a window. And I wouldn’t accept his apology.”

“Do you think both could be true? That you were angry and frightened and trying to stand up for yourself and your sister, and at the same time, you wanted parental love and affection?”

“I…don’t know,” said Elliot. He sounded doubtful, but he hadn’t rejected the suggestion outright.

“I’d like to ask you about something different,” said Krista. “Looking back, do you have any idea whether your father molested your sister?”

“I don’t think so,” said Elliot. “He didn’t spend a lot of time with her. He liked me better. And she was a really loud kid. Shouted everything. She was terrible at hide-and-seek. So she wouldn’t have been able to keep a secret.” Elliot crossed his arms, his lips curling up in a thin, fake smile.

“In the narrative, you briefly thought he was abusing her. What were you feeling during that time?”

“Just…worried, I guess. That he had hurt her like he hurt me.”

“Of course. But I’m wondering if you felt something else as well.”

Elliot shrugged. “Like what?”

“You’ve told me how your father’s attention made you feel special.”

“So?”

“And that he loved you more than he loved anyone else in the world.”

“What are you getting at?”

Krista lay her hands down on her notepad. “When you thought he might have sexual contact with your sister, something he had said that only you were special enough to receive, do you think you might have felt jealous?”

Elliot’s eyes narrowed. “ _Jealous?!_ He had just _fucked_ me! I was still bleeding! I had to stuff toilet paper in my briefs. I wanted to _protect_ her.” He wasn’t yelling, but his voice was intense.

“I absolutely believe that to be true. But your time with your father wasn’t all pain. There were times when he gave you safe, appropriate, non-sexual attention. And given how little warmth you received from your mother, it would be only natural for you to want to keep your father’s love for yourself.”

“What the fuck? You’re the one who’s always saying I didn’t really want it.”

“Want what?” asked Krista.

“Him to…do those things.” Elliot swallowed. “The sexual stuff.”

“He made you feel as though sex were the price of admission for love. It was love you wanted. But he mixed the two together so thoroughly that even now you have difficulty imagining one without the other.”

“That’s not…”

“I said you wanted your father’s love and you thought I was talking about sex.”

Elliot was silent for several moments. Then, “It wasn’t as-if, though, was it? It wasn’t _as if_ sex was the prerequisite for love. Because I stopped the sex and then he stopped…”

“I don’t know if he stopped loving you. He said some cruel things. When people have to face the consequences of their actions, they lash out, even if that’s unreasonable and unfair. At the same time, it’s possible to be angry with someone and still love them.”

“I know,” said Elliot, “because I still love him.”


	10. Gregory

“I should have done something sooner. Then I wouldn’t have to do all this shit now.” Elliot handed over his tracking page.

Krista examined his narrative SUDS scores from the past week. He had attempted the exercise only four times, but all four had been successful. “Do you mean as an adult you should have sought therapy sooner? Or that you should have taken action as a child?”

“As a kid. I should have done something before it got bad.”

Krista folded her hands as she breathed slowly, in and out. They were moving into the final phase of the therapy, in which she helped Elliot generalize the gains he had made in confronting the memories of the abuse to the thoughts and problems that continued to affect his everyday life. “I think it’s time we really discuss the issue of responsibility. Let’s make a list,” she said, “of all the things you should have done. Of all the reasons why you’re responsible for what happened.” She clicked her pen open and held it poised over her notepad.

“I could have told him ‘no’.”

Krista obligingly copied Elliot’s contribution down, but added, “You did, when he attempted anal penetration.”

“I could have said it earlier.”

Krista nodded.

“And I didn’t have to go along with it. He wasn’t physically forcing me. I didn’t have to do all the things he wanted.”

Krista continued writing.

“I wanted it sometimes. And you’re going to say that I wanted his attention, but I wanted the sex too. It felt good.”

Krista paused in writing. “You wanted your father’s attention and you took pleasure in sexual stimulation. Is that correct?” She kept her voice studiously neutral.

“Yes.” Elliot sounded more confident. “And it started because I practically gave him a lap dance. I was curious. He was answering my questions. I made it sexual. Sometimes I initiated it.”

“When you say you initiated it, do you mean you asked your father to go off alone with you to do sexual things? Or that you were the first to touch when you were already alone?”

“I asked him to go off with me. I probably never said to have sex. But once we were alone, I started it sometimes.”

Krista nodded. “Okay, and what other reasons?”

“I could have told someone and I didn’t.”

“Of course, that couldn’t happen until you knew something bad was happening. When would you say you realized that?”

“I was a smart kid. Pretty fast. Definitely by the time he was blowing me.”

“And then there’s everything you owed to your father,” added Krista. “He was sick. He needed you.”

“Yeah,” said Elliot, “we were close. It wasn’t like he could talk to my mom. Wasn’t like I could either.”

“Okay,” said Krista, “is that it? Or are there more reasons?”

Elliot looked down and to the left, considering. “I could have fought. Not just said no. I mean, I had his dick in my mouth. I could have bit down.”

Krista wrote that down as well. She tore out the page, turned it around, and placed it on the table between them. “That’s all the reasons you listed.” It said, ‘could have said no earlier’, ‘wanted attention’, ‘wanted sex pleasure’, ‘asked dad for 1-on-1 time’, ‘started touching when alone’, ‘didn’t tell (earlier)’, ‘(eventually) knew it was wrong’, ‘mom not enough for dad’, ‘dad needed me’, ‘could have fought’. “It’s a lot,” she said. “Would you be surprised to know that I’ve heard all of these reasons before?”

Elliot shrugged.

Krista took the paper back. “Could you imagine that I was a friend? A man about your age, good with computers, who you saw in the evenings for games, movies, maybe a drink? We’ll call me Gregory.” There were a number of different approaches to consider at this point. The most common was for the therapist to play the role of an actual close friend of the client, but Elliot’s social circle had always been narrow and the subject of his only intense extrafamilial relationship, Angela, had recently died. That left Darlene as Elliot’s only strong bond, but the purpose of the exercise was to get the client to consider the situation from an outside perspective and Darlene, even a fictional Darlene, couldn’t fulfill that role for obvious reasons.

“I guess.” Elliot sounded skeptical, or – at the very least – uncomfortable.

“Elliot,” said Krista, “I’ve been having a rough time and I want to tell you why. It’s because of this stupid thing I did when I was a kid.” Her voice and posture didn’t really change. She knew she wasn’t a good actor and that trying to be one was more distracting that just saying ‘Gregory’s’ lines in her own voice. “You see, my father is financially destitute and wants me to support him. It’s hard for him to make money because he’s been incarcerated and he’s on the sex offender registry.”

“Uhh…how is him being poor because of you?” Elliot’s question was slow and halting, either because he had difficulty expressing himself in social situations, or because the role play concept was awkward.

“Oh, he went to prison for molesting me.”

“How old were you?”

“I was six or seven when it started. It kept going until I was eight. That’s when he got arrested.”

“You said it was a stupid thing you did. What did you do that was stupid?”

“Ugh,” Krista sighed, “I did a lot of stupid things. I practically seduced him! I sat on his lap while he was reading me a book. I wiggled around. I must have wanted him to get a hard on.”

“Well, I mean, if you were a little kid, you sit on people’s laps. It’s not a sex thing when a kid does it. It’s like the difference between seeing a stripper’s tits and seeing a woman breastfeed.” Elliot managed to look guarded as he capitulated.

“Yeah,” said Krista, “but I kept at it. I was always asking him to do stuff with me – to play video games, help me with my homework, cook – even though I knew that when we were alone, he’d sometimes want to touch me.”

“You said ‘sometimes’,” said Elliot. “So sometimes he did normal stuff and sometimes he’d molest you?”

“Mm-hm. If I really didn’t want it,” said Krista, “I would have given up all that normal dad stuff.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works. If you’re eight, somebody’s got to make you food. You can’t just decide you don’t want that.”

“But I wanted him to hang out with me to do activities that weren’t life-or-death. I wanted him to take me to the movies, to read me books, to teach me about computers.”

Elliot scratched under his chin. “Doesn’t every kid want that? I mean, maybe not that exactly, but they all want parents to do fun stuff. But most of the parents don’t touch their kids. So you wanting that couldn’t have made your dad act that way. Otherwise, every dad would.”

“You’re not getting it,” said Krista. “My dad and I were best friends. He didn’t have any adults he could rely on, so he needed me to act like an adult for him. He told me things you don’t tell a kid – things you tell a peer – like how he was fighting with my mom and she wouldn’t have sex with him. He was really sad a lot of the time and he needed me to cheer him up.”

“I don’t think kids make you happy,” said Elliot. “Everyone I’ve ever seen with kids is really stressed out all the time. I don’t think kids are responsible for making parents happy.”

“Well, most people aren’t like my dad and me. He taught me to go down on him because it made him feel really good, and I saw that when he was in a bad mood, it cheered him up. There were times when he didn’t even have to ask. I just went down on him.”

“Yeah, I get you’d want to make him happy. But you wouldn’t do just anything. I mean, a whole lot of cocaine would make him really happy too, but you’re not buying him that.”

“Exactly,” said Krista-as-Gregory, “I shouldn’t have done something for him that I knew was bad.”

“You said he taught you, though. How were you supposed to know that something you dad taught you was bad?” The earlier awkwardness was largely gone. Elliot seemed completely engaged in the role-play, taking seriously his job of finding counter-arguments to Gregory’s assertions.

“Some things are just bad. I must have known. It made me feel bad, some of the time at least. I felt dirty. And I knew I had to keep it a secret. Why would something have to be a secret if it wasn’t bad?”

“There’s probably some things that it’s instinct to know what’s right and wrong, but I think a lot of morality has to be learned. Two hundred years ago you would have learned that slavery is okay. And there are things that feel bad but they’re good, or at least not wrong. Like going to the dentist, or meeting new people, or taking medicine, or getting grounded. Kids just have to rely on their parents to sort that kind of thing out.”

“I kept it a secret for so long. I had chances to tell people and I didn’t take them. There were people who asked me outright but I lied. Why would I have done that if I didn’t want it?”

“Did your dad tell you to keep it a secret?”

“Yes. He said he was trusting me, relying on me not to tell.”

“Then maybe you kept it a secret because of that, not because you wanted it. You just didn’t want to let your dad down.” Elliot gave a little half-shrug with his explanation.

“Maybe that was part of it, but part was – god, this is embarrassing – there were times when it kind of felt good. I had these…I guess they were little kid erections. I even had orgasms. Dry ones. It felt good. I mean, it felt weird too. Overwhelming. Kind of like my body was out of control. But I must have liked it and maybe that’s why I got him to do it.”

“But you didn’t start having hard-ons until after he started touching you. So you couldn’t have done wanted that ahead of time.”

“I guess I got him to _keep_ doing it,” clarified Krista-as-Gregory. “He always said he liked the way I looked when I was aroused.”

“I’m pretty sure there are kids that age who jerk off. They get the good part without feeling scared or overwhelmed. Or trying to get someone else off. I think if your dad really wanted you to be happy and you really wanted sexual feelings, he would have just let you jerk off by yourself.”

“I know there were bad parts, but I let it go for so long. When it started, it wasn’t very much. It wasn’t even a major crime to begin with. But I didn’t fight him or even tell him no. I let it keep going and getting more severe until it was out of control and he did something that was worth serious time.”

Elliot formed his hands into tight fists before releasing them. He did this two more times. “I knew this guy, he was a total psychopath. He was a drug dealer, a supplier. He drugged this girl who lived across the hall from me and he had sex with her while she was out of it. When he was talking about it, he said, ‘she never said no’, which was true because she was practically unconscious.” Elliot made his hands into fists again. “I think it’s not enough that the person doesn’t say no. If you’re having sex with someone, they have to be mentally aware and able to make choices. They can’t be drugged, and they can’t be a little kid.”

“You’re comparing it to rape! It couldn’t have been that bad. If it was that bad, then why didn’t I fight him? I could have gotten a weapon or used my brain.”

“I don’t think you could have won. He was stronger than your mom and she hit you. Transitive property. Besides, she was still burning you with her cigarettes when you were taller than her because you just didn’t fight her. Maybe he was the same way. Maybe you didn’t want to hurt him. He was your dad. You loved him.” Elliot inhaled sharply, obviously aware that he had imbued ‘Gregory’ with some traits that Krista had not supplied.

Krista, for her part, put the list of reasons back down on the table. Each one had a checkmark next to it. She had a slight, sad smile. “How was that role play for you?”

“It was…strange. The things I was saying seemed obvious when it was about someone else. Even someone you made up.”

“It wasn’t exactly made up. Everything I said to you, another client has said to me.” Krista paused. “I’m not telling you that to minimize your experience or make you feel like it’s commonplace. I’m telling you that because I’m hoping you’ll recognize that you were no more to blame than they were.”

Elliot looked down. “The rapist was Vera. He…Shayla…that’s how he knew me.”

Krista suppressed a shudder at Vera’s name. Her experience with trauma had been almost entirely vicarious until she was kidnapped, threatened, and forced to kill in self-defense. She pulled a photocopied page out from the file she was holding and passed it to Elliot. “This is a list of all sorts of difficulties that affect people who suffered sexual abuse as children. I’d like you to scan it now to see if you have any questions. Then, over the next week, I’d like you to identify the ones that are most relevant to you. We’ll use that to plan what we do next.”

The list was her own creation, compiled from her clinical training, professional education, and the first-hand experiences of her patients. It contained upsetting thoughts (“Thinking I am to blame for consequences faced by my abuser”, “Thinking that men care only about sex”), self-sabotaging behaviors (“Avoiding healthy conflict with safe people”, “Using drugs or alcohol to avoid distress”), sexual problems (“Not staying present and enjoying wanted sex”, “Having sex that conflicts with my values”), family and interpersonal problems (“Respecting others’ boundaries and privacy”, “Coping with a family member’s feelings of guilt for not guessing, intervening sooner”), issues of identity (“Worrying that my sexual identity is related to the abuse”, “Feeling empty or worthless”), feelings related to the abuser (“Preparing to go somewhere I might see my abuser”, “Deciding whether to confront my abuser”), and a wide range of practical problems (“Participating in casual conversation about sex – e.g., when did you lose your virginity”, “Using public restrooms”, “Making contact with strangers in a crowd”).

“Going to the dentist?” asked Elliot.

“Some people find that it feels vulnerable, leaning back in the chair. You often can’t see people behind you, and then they put things in your mouth, perhaps even make you gag.” She used evocative language in her description to see how Elliot would react, but he appeared unphased. “How do you feel about the dentist?”

“It’s fine. I had a tooth out a couple of years ago and it was okay.”

“Luckily, no one has trouble with all, or even most, of these things. It’s just a way to help you think of possibilities. You can add more if you think none of the options are capturing a problem that’s important to you.”

Elliot pointed to “Disclosing abuse to friends or family”. “We have to talk about Darlene.”

“I agree.”

“I have to keep listening to the audio files, don’t I?”

“You don’t have to, but I hope you will. And I hope that as you do, you’ll imagine what you would say to a friend who had experienced the same thing.”


	11. Stage Fright

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My suspicion is always that a therapy transcript like this does not make for scintillating reading, but it has been interesting to write.

“Let’s start with your narrative homework,” said Krista. She held out her hand for the record form. Even for the most disturbing stories, Elliot’s SUDS scores peaked around fifty and fell below twenty before the hour was finished. That was a solid end state. It was fine to be moderately distressed by the detailed recollection of something truly awful – the problems began when the patient was distressed by stimuli only loosely related to the trauma. By attenuating his emotional reaction to the abuse details from its prior peak, they had taught his brain that trauma reminders were manageable, not terrifying. “This is excellent work, Elliot. There’s one last step. I want you to go back through the narratives and adjust them like we did the last one, so you’re not referring to Mr. Robot as a separate person. Do you think you can do that?”

“Sure,” said Elliot. “It’ll give me something to think about instead of just the same story over and over again. I get bored.” He pulled some folded papers from his hoodie pocket and handed them to Krista. “I checked off a lot of things on your list.”

As Krista unfolded the worksheets, she asked, “How do you feel about that?”

“Like a critical defect. Like I’m programmed with an error so severe that there is no workaround.”

“You’re facing more challenges than most people, but you also have strengths that few people have.” Krista skimmed the checklist, noting the items that Elliot had selected. It wasn’t actually an unusually high number for an adult survivor of child sexual abuse, but convincing Elliot of that would be difficult and not particularly productive. “If I had asked you three months ago whether you could get to the point of describing a detailed narrative of the abuse as boring, do you think you would have said yes?”

Elliot’s face and chest moved in a single, silent laugh. “That’s fair,” he said. “You win this round.”

“Looking at your checklist, I’m seeing some patterns, some groups of problems that can probably be addressed as one. For example, ‘wanting to confront my abuser’, ‘wanting to reconcile with my abuser’, and ‘wanting revenge or justice’ all go together. That also helps things move more quickly.” Krista looked further along the list. “I see you’ve checked, ‘difficulty getting or keeping a job’. Is employment a priority for you right now?”

“Not exactly, but I don’t want to sit at home forever. Darlene’s started working with the Department of Transportation, pen testing for infrastructure flaws. She bitches about the people she works with and the dress code and the bullshit corporate promotions, but she likes it. She’s good at it. She gets to be on a team and accomplish stuff and have a place to go every day. It’s good for her.”

“Do you think those benefits would be good for you too?” Krista didn’t ask about money as a motivation for work – she was confident that Elliot was on top of his finances, and did not want to know the details of any misappropriation that had led to his current state of economic security.

“Yeah. I kinda miss AllSafe. There’s only so much _Seinfeld_ I can watch. Every episode’s the same.” He shook his head. “But I can’t pass a background check, let alone get a security clearance.”

“You don’t need to tell me any details you don’t want to, but I’m wondering how your sister got her job. I always thought she had some involvement in some…extralegal actions.”

“We did different stuff,” said Elliot. “Her girlfriend’s FBI. Or was FBI. Works for the DOJ now. Because Darlene didn’t do the things I did, her girlfriend could get things worked out. But she said she can’t for me.”

“Because you were involved in something more serious,” confirmed Krista. She had a strong suspicion ‘more serious’ had something to do with Elliot’s panicked visit on the day of the eCorp bombings, but she was willing to proceed in general terms. There were therapists who worked with violent offenders on a regular basis but she wasn’t one of them. She often took court-ordered cases that involved drug or property crime but only rarely those who had directly assaulted a person.

“Yeah. So I guess private sector. And Dom – that’s Darlene’s girlfriend’s name – told me to keep my head down and stay out of security, defense, law enforcement, finance, that sort of thing. Doesn’t leave me with a lot of options.”

“How would you feel about looking at job postings this week? Not preparing to apply for anything, just getting a sense of what’s out there.” Regular work would be good for Elliot. Apart from income, it would provide an opportunity to socialize, a reason to keep a schedule, and a set solvable puzzles to be tackled.

“I could do that.” Elliot paused. “Darlene’s invited me to move in with her. She’s getting a new place in the Bronx, closer to her new job.”

“What do you think of that idea?”

“We fight a lot. But she cares. Her girlfriend is okay. It would save on rent. She doesn’t like it when I keep secrets from her, so I probably couldn’t get away with as much sneaking around.” Elliot shrugged. “I don’t want her to have to take care of me.”

“I thought _she_ asked _you_ to move in.”

“Yeah?”

“That doesn’t sound like you’re forcing her to help you, like she has to take care of you.”

“She feels obligated.”

“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t genuinely want to as well. I’m obligated to feed my cat, but I also enjoy doing it.” Krista tapped her pen once against her notepad. “This would seem to go with one of the items you checked: disclosing your abuse history to people you’re close with. You’ve brought up telling her before.”

“I hurt her keeping secrets. And she always wanted to understand how I got so messed up. And it’s her dad too. She deserves to know.”

“You’re allowed to have some personal privacy. You don’t have to tell someone just because they want to know.”

“But it’s why I haven’t told her, that’s why she gets mad, not just that there’s stuff she doesn’t know. If I’m acting like she can’t handle shit, or I won’t let her help me. That’s what pisses her off.”

“And what are reasons not to tell her?”

Elliot looked quickly from side to side as if searching the room. “You’re saying I shouldn’t tell her?”

“I’m saying you haven’t. You’ve mentioned reasons for disclosing to her before. What’s holding you back?”

“It’s going to make her…she’s going to be upset.”

“Yes, I think that’s very likely.” Krista leaned slightly forward. “Do you think she’s going to be angry with you?”

“Probably not. But she has problems too. She has panic attacks. She yells and breaks stuff. And she’ll have questions and she’ll want to talk about it. And I’ll just want to leave and if I do she’ll be even more upset.” Elliot sighed. “Can you tell Darlene? I mean, if I sign something for confidentiality.”

Krista tried to judge whether this was a serious request or just a way of expressing anxiety about the pending disclosure.

“Disclosing has never gone well for you: Your mother didn’t offer you any sympathy, Vera didn’t have your best interests at heart, and I convinced you to tell to preserve our safety, not because it was what you needed psychologically.”

“Darlene isn’t like any of you,” said Elliot. He seemed to realize he had grouped Krista in with Vera and his mother. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Krista. “Let’s try this from a different angle. What are the worst responses you can think of that Darlene might actually give?”

Elliot tipped his head to the side. “She might…she might freak out. She could have a panic attack or start breaking things or something.” He paused. “Or she might not believe me. She wouldn’t think I was making it up, but maybe that I was just crazy and I hallucinated it or something.” He frowned. “Or she might say that it can’t be a big deal because I must’ve wanted it because dad wasn’t a violent guy.”

Krista nodded, writing on her notepad. “Good. Any other bad responses you can imagine from her?”

“She might…I’ve always been…not okay. She might just be sick of me being messed up. Just one more thing.”

Krista tore the top page out of her notepad and lay it between them on the table. It showed a messy 4-by-3 grid of unevenly sized boxes. In the first column were abbreviations of the four reactions Elliot had mentioned: ‘freak out’, ‘not believe’, ‘blame me’, ‘sick of me’. Above the top row were the labels ‘reaction’, ‘likelihood’, ‘handle?’. “These,” she pointed to the first column, “are the worst responses she might have. We’re going to decide how likely they are-“ she pointed to the middle column, “and whether you could handle it if she actually reacted that way.” She finished by pointing to the last column.

Elliot narrowed his eyes. “Freak out is pretty likely. She’s gonna be upset. Is it a one to ten scale? I’d give freaking out a nine. And then, sick of me is more likely than blame me and they’re both more likely than not believe me. Maybe a seven, a four, and a two.”

Krista filled in Elliot’s likelihood ratings. “You think there’s a pretty good chance she might be sick of you. Why?”

“Because I’ve spent her whole life having problems, relying on her and Angela to put me back together.”

“You’ve had problems in the past and she’s stuck by you.”

“Sometimes,” said Elliot. “Sometimes I’ve been, you know, too much for her.” He leaned forward. “I guess…I guess she came back eventually. Even when I was too much, it wasn’t forever.”

“That’s a really good observation, Elliot. If she’s overwhelmed by this news and decides she needs some time apart, that doesn’t have to be permanent.” Krista paused. “And you think she’s fairly unlikely to blame you and really unlikely to not believe you. Why is that?”

“She’ll believe me because she knows better than anybody that people can have dark secrets, that just because dad seemed nice and normal didn’t mean he was. And she won’t blame me because of what we’ve talked about, that it’s easier to see the kid isn’t to blame when it’s not you. In fact, you can switch blame to a two.”

“Let’s skip to the last column,” said Krista, “whether you could handle it. Could you handle it if your sister freaks out?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen her do that a bunch of times.”

Krista put a Y at the intersection of ‘freak out’ and ‘handle?’ “And what if she needs some time apart? Do you think you could handle that?”

“I’ve done it before. It hasn’t gone great though.”

“You’d have to go back to coping with these experiences on your own, like you are now.”

“Put a question mark. Because even though we don’t talk about this stuff, we still talk and I don’t want to lose that.”

Krista followed Elliot’s instructions. “And could you handle not being believed?”

Elliot almost smiled for a very brief moment. “I’d be okay with that. It would make me doubt myself and then I could pretend it wasn’t true.”

Perhaps not the best of coping mechanisms, but Krista would take optimism wherever she could find it from Elliot. She put a Y in the ‘handle?’ column. “And what if she blames you?”

“That would be…that would be really bad.”

“It would be very, very hurtful.” When Krista had worked in victim advocacy, many of the worst cases she saw were children who’s so-called nonoffending caretaker had blamed them for the abuse.

Elliot’s fingers rested on his legs, curled slightly, like he was going to play the piano. “It wouldn’t really change things, though. I mean, if it’s my fault, it is whether she thinks so or not. And if it isn’t, I can’t really be mad at her for thinking something I thought.”

Three Y’s and a question mark was pretty good. The point of the exercise was to show that disclosing to someone who cared was unlikely to be catastrophic. “Remember, these were your most negative predictions. We haven’t even talked about more positive responses that may well be more likely, especially if we talk about how you want to present things.” Krista leaned forward slightly. “What would the ideal outcome be?”

“I’d go home. She wouldn’t be upset. It wouldn’t change things.”

“I can understand why you would want to leave after telling her. You might feel embarrassed or ashamed. You might be worried about her response and not want to risk staying around for her to say the wrong thing. You might feel overwhelmed with your own emotions and want to step back to get control of yourself.” Krista paused before saying, “How do you think it would make her feel, if you told her that and left?”

Elliot looked to the left, lips pursed in thought. “She’d be worried about me getting hurt or doing something stupid, and pissed at me for ignoring her.” He frowned. “So I have to stay?”

“Sometimes there’s a compromise. What if you told her that you were going to go do something – something safe - for a certain length of time and that you would return later? Then she wouldn’t have to worry and you wouldn’t be ignoring her, just taking a time out.”

“I could…I could probably do that.”

“That might help with your fear that she will freak out as well. She probably will have an emotional reaction to this information, but a little time apart will help you both collect yourselves. It will also show her that you are working on managing your own emotions, but you’re willing to be open with her. That will make her less likely to decide she’s sick of your problems.”

“I’d still have to come back. She’ll have questions. She’ll want to _do_ something. To fix it, to punish somebody.”

“You don’t have to,” said Krista, “but I think she’ll want you to.”

“She’ll have questions,” said Elliot, in a tone which implicitly equated _questions_ with _fire ants_. “I won’t be able to talk about it. It’s gotten easier but it’s still hard.”

“Could you tell her that? Say, ‘I know you want to ask questions, but it’s too hard for me to talk about it right now.’”

“She’d have questions about me not talking,” said Elliot with just a little bit of a smile. “I guess I could write down my answers,” he added, half-joking.

Some of Krista’s previous clients had written their disclosures entirely. That had benefits – it circumvented the hard-to-speak problem and outpaced interruptions. But it also had downsides. Some people didn’t like the permanent nature of writing or worried it could be found. Other patients spent an overly long time fretting over every single word until precision became another means of avoidance. “Have you thought about what you would say to her?”

“A lot. It never seems right.”

“In what way?”  
  
Elliot shook his head. “I can’t think of a way to say it that won’t get her all pissed off. Unless she’s really high, but she’s not doing that so much since she started dating a fed. Maybe I missed my window.”

“Do you think her reaction will depend on the words you choose? Or on finding out that someone she cares about was harmed?”

Elliot didn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question.

“Do you want to rehearse?”

Elliot shook his head. “I think I just have to do it. This week. It could be later, but if I wait, I’ll just find a reason to keep avoiding. Avoid avoiding. That’s the thing, right.”

Krista nodded. She said, “We agreed that she’s going to have a strong emotional reaction. When you talk to her, I want you to remember that people who are very distressed don’t choose their words carefully. She might be so focused on her own feelings that she says things she doesn’t mean. If that happens, I believe you can handle it.”


	12. Fan-fucking-tastic

“Were you ever, I mean did someone ever-“ Elliot shut his mouth as if interrupted.

“Were you going to ask if I had ever been the victim of sexual assault or abuse?” Krista folded her hands on her crossed legs.

“It’s none of my business.”

“It’s important that we keep our time here focused on you, so I’d like to know why you were curious about that.” She waited to see if he would begin speaking. When he didn’t, she continued, “Are you wondering if I can understand what you’ve been through?”

“No,” he said, “it was more like…you seem okay. I see people all the time, some are fucked up and some aren’t. And I assume the fucked ones are the ones who had fucked up things done to them. And the okay ones are the ones who didn’t. But I don’t actually know.”

“It’s really good that you noticed the problem in your own logic. You believed it was true only because it fit the assumptions you were making about people. The fact is, there is a relationship. People who have experienced trauma are more likely to have major difficulties in mental health and daily living, but there are people who were never traumatized who have similar difficulties, and there are people who faced severe trauma who nonetheless function just fine.”

“Why don’t I feel better? I did all those narratives over and over. And I still feel angry all the time. I still feel hollow. I feel like a wobbly tower made of organs and skin.”

“You haven’t made as much progress as you had hoped.”

“Is this really the best I can hope for? Getting through the day without snorting morphine? Not getting in fist fights with the ghost of my dead dad?”

“What makes you think that you’re done making progress?”

“I told Darlene.”

“I see.” Krista kept her face as neutral as possible. Unhelpful or hurtful reactions were common, even in the context of healthy, caring relationships. People were shocked, didn’t know what to say, lacked a context for the disclosure, so poorly considered words were the norm, not the exception.

“Do you want to hear it?” Without waiting for a response, Elliot pulled out his phone and set it on the table between them.

_D: I, Darlene Alderson, do hereby consent to be recorded. That wasn’t necessary. You know New York is a one-party consent state._

_E: You wouldn’t like it if I recorded you without permission._

_D: Damn right, I wouldn’t. Why do you want to record our conversation? Is this one of those “other Elliot” things?_

_E: No. It’s to show to my therapist. And I might have to listen to it over and over. I don’t know yet._

_D: Glad I could contribute to your weird-ass OCD._

_**long pause**_

_E: How well do you remember Dad?_

_D: Uh…I mean, I remember some. I was pretty young. I don’t remember as much as you. I remember that he used to make us pancakes and let us eat them with our fingers. Even if we had syrup._

_**inaudible**_

_D: You aren’t recording a conversation so we can talk about pancakes._

_E: Was Dad ever…do you ever remember him…did he ever hurt you?_

_D: What, like Mom did? Not that I remember. He didn’t even spank me._

_E: Okay, that, but did he ever…I don’t know…_

_D: Why are you asking me this, Elliot?_

_E: I- fuck. He loved me. I mean, he loved you, but it was different._

_D: I know that. You guys were super close. He spent all this time with you. I was kind of jealous._

_E: He did. He spent a lot of time with me. More than, even more than you think. Sometimes he’d pull me out of school. Or he’d be there at night._

_D: At night?_

_E: Yeah. He would, he would… I’ve always known it, but it was hard to think about so I ignored it. It’s…it’s…I guess it’s why I’m not myself sometimes. Because I had to be somebody else to-_

_D (interrupting): Wait, what are you talking about? What were you ignoring?_

_E: Remember snowman Kevin McAllister? The day I jumped out the window? I didn’t want to be there, in my room, because I didn’t like what happened when I was in my bedroom with Dad._

_D: Shit, Elliot. Did he-? He seemed- I never thought he was-_

_E (interrupting): A child molester? Yeah, nobody thought that, except him and me._

_D: Jesus! Fuck! How did he- I mean, was it just once or-?_

_E: Not just once._

_D: …are you sure? I don’t mean- I’m not trying to- If you’re sure, you’re sure. I just mean sometimes you remember things wrong. Like you thought Dad pushed you out the window._

_E: I’m sure._

_D: God fucking damn it!_

_**A loud clattering sound**_

_D: He was supposed to be…compared to mom, he was the good one! What the fuck kind of sick joke is this? The fucking universe thinks, ‘I know, let’s make this kid and pile every possible kind of fuckery on his plate and see what happens. Maybe he and his sister will tank the world economy for funsies!’_

_**More crashing noises**_

_D: Did mom know? Did she let it happen?_

_E: I don’t know. She tried to do something when I told her._

_D: How could-?_

_E: I…I need to take a walk. I can’t answer questions. I’m going to the corner mart and back. Fifteen minutes._

_D: Wait, are you-?_

_E: I’m not going to do anything stupid._

_**Footsteps**_

_**Doorknob sound**_

_E: Wait._

_D: I’m not the one that’s leaving._

_E: I didn’t say it. You guessed. I didn’t actually say it. I need to-_

_D: I’m listening. Say what you need to say._

_**Silence**_

_E: Dad raped me._

_**Door opens and shuts**_

Elliot picked up his phone. “It went well. As good as it could go. When I got back she wanted to ask questions but we just watched a movie instead.”

Krista was genuinely unsure what to say. Based on the recording, Elliot’s disclosure to his sister had gone very well. Elliot had expressed himself, had even been able to force himself to speak directly instead of hinting, and Darlene had accepted the new information without attacking, minimizing, or blaming. “What about that experience led you to feel like you’re not getting better?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if Elliot could answer that question, but asking seemed better than not doing so.

Elliot didn’t respond.

“Is there something she said that really bothered you?”

He shook his head.

“Is there something you really wish she had said?”

He shook his head.

“You set a goal of telling Darlene soon after we began meeting again,” said Krista, slowly. “It was your first goal, even above defusing the memories of the abuse. And now you’ve met that goal.”

“But I’m still fucked up,” said Elliot. “I’ve done what I’m supposed to do to get better. And what have I accomplished? I can think about my dad shoving his dick down my throat without sweating like I’m in withdrawal. Well, that’s just fucking great. Now I can think about it. What a fucking prize that is. And now I’ve told Darlene. Good for me. I’ve made her hate the only parent who didn’t treat her like shit and given her one more reason to worry about me. I still have trouble with half the shit on that list of problems you gave me, and the only reason I don’t have trouble with the other half is that it’s shit that doesn’t apply to me! I’m sure if I had been fucked by a priest or pimped out, I’d have all those problems too.”

Krista sat in silence for a moment, letting Elliot’s rant sink in. He _had_ made enormous progress, compared to the paranoid, secretive patient who she had taken from a court order, and especially compared to the stunned, barely-aware mess she had shepherded to the police station in the wake of Vera’s violent interrogation. “Are you worried that this is the best it can ever get?”

“I’m worried there’s something missing inside of me. That thing that tells normal people how to act, how to feel, how to relate to each other. And the best I can do is learn to fake it.”

“You think that other people are more real, more genuine, than you could ever be.”

“Garbage in, garbage out. I’m built on nothing.”

“And you’re confident that other people are built on something?”

“I think…whatever they’re made of, they’ve made peace with it. They can be happy with reality TV and gluten free chicken wraps.”

Krista was almost happy to hear a hint of Elliot’s old anti-capitalist rants. Hating society was broadly maladaptive, but it had provided Elliot with a source of self-esteem, a way to establish a positive identity for himself, even if he did so by putting everyone else down. The difficulty with Elliot’s assertion that he was “missing” something was that it wasn’t entirely wrong. Early, severe trauma led many people to avoid or fail at important developmental tasks, which meant that they lacked normal skills and experiences. Addressing the trauma didn’t turn back time and magic those skills into existence, but they could still be learned in adulthood. The classic example was an adult who had avoided dating entirely because sex reminded them of traumatic sexual abuse. Desensitization could break the link between sex and trauma, but the adult patient would not automatically have age-typical skills in flirting, maintaining a relationship, and sexually pleasing a partner. Those skills could be learned, though, if the patient didn’t give up.

“Elliot,” said Krista, “we don’t choose the circumstances of our birth. You didn’t choose to have parents who were unable or unwilling to provide a safe, loving home. But there were other ways you were lucky, other advantages you have that many other people do not. You were born without sensorimotor disability. What else?”

Elliot frowned at her, not liking this line of questioning, but he said, “I was born in the U.S., not North Korea or Bangladesh. I wasn’t born in poverty. I was born in a hospital. I was never malnourished.” He grimaced. “I should be thankful for what I’ve got and stop complaining.”

“That’s not what I was getting at. I was suggesting that there are people born into even worse circumstances than you who managed to live happy lives. I want you to know it’s possible for you too. You’re not cursed any more than they are.”

Elliot said nothing.

“And you have internal assets as well.”

“I’m good at computer crime.”

“Your skill at computers shows your general intelligence, which is a very valuable trait. My clients with low IQs struggle to understand the instructions on over-the-counter medications and get conned by rental agreements they can’t read. But your computer skills also show your persistence and dedication. Lots of smart people never develop an advanced talent like that because they never applied themselves. You did.”

“And Darlene.”

“Hm?”

“And I’ve got Darlene. She’s an asset.” After a moment, he added, “She’s a genius too,” as if he worried that he was underselling her worth by omitting that clarification.

“Yes, you have a sister who loves you.” Krista set her pen down. “Elliot, it’s okay to feel discouraged – you’re allowed – but you’re also allowed to feel proud of the progress you’ve made.”

“I went looking for morphine. After I told Darlene.” Elliot spoke in hushed, confessional tones and rubbed both eyes with both hands. “The only reason I didn’t do it is that I couldn’t find a dealer.”

“The only reason you didn’t do it is that you couldn’t find a dealer before you changed your mind. You would have found one by now if you had kept looking.”

“I went looking for it.”

“I believe you. And I also believe that at some point, your desire not to relapse exceeded your desire to get high.”

“Optimist,” said Elliot. He said it like a curse word.


	13. Sexual Attraction

“I did something stupid and I don’t know why.”

“Tell me more,” said Krista.

“I went to this bar. I let someone pick me up, take me home.”

“This someone was male?”

“Yeah.”

“A gay bar?”

“Yeah.”

“You said you ‘let’ him pick you up. What was that like?”

“He bought me a few drinks. We talked. He did most of the talking. He’s a radiology technician. He wants to visit Montreal. He just started watching _The Good Place_ and he can’t get enough of it. Then he asked me if I wanted to come back to his place for some weed and wine. I said yes.”

“Did you find him attractive?”

“No. He was good looking except this birthmark on his neck. He was good looking, but not to- I’m not attracted to men.”

“Do you know why you went to a gay bar?”

“No.”

“Tell me what happened after you left the bar with this man.”

“We walked to his place. It wasn’t far. I was a little buzzed but not drunk. It was a shitty neighborhood, a shitty place, but he kept it nice. We lit up. We had wine in plastic cups. He started touching me. Kissing me. I couldn’t remember how to kiss back. He asked me what was wrong and I said it was okay. He pulled his shirt off and I told myself it was just like touching a woman. We were on his couch and he pushed me back so he could kiss my chest and I…I panicked.”

“What happened next?”

“I want to say I got away, but he wasn’t trying to hold me there. But I felt like I was escaping. I left my shirt there. I couldn’t go back for it.”

“How did the man respond?”

“He asked if I was okay, if I was sick. I think he was a little offended. Maybe just confused.” Elliot shrugged. “Or just horny.”

“Since your father’s death, have you had sexual contact with a man?”

“When I was eighteen, nineteen or so, I had a dealer who would sometimes give me a discount if I let him feel me up. I agreed sometimes.”

“What did feeling you up entail?”

“Just groping my ass. I didn’t enjoy it, but it didn’t bother me. It was worth twenty dollars. That was maybe three or four times.”

“Did it ever go farther?”

Elliot shook his head. “And more recently there was this man who was in love with me. Obsessed with me. He was crazy. Everything at maximum all the time.”

“Were you interested in him?”

“He was interesting. Literally. But I wouldn’t have been attracted even if he’d been a woman. He was a corporate type. Nice suits. Fancy everything.”

“How did he express his infatuation?”

“He tried to help me with a project. He did help me. Sacrificed a lot to do it. But the project wasn’t about rewards. And other people sacrificed more.”

“And,” said Krista, “you can’t owe someone romantic or sexual attraction. You can’t turn it on or off even if you want to."

Elliot paused, taking that in. "He’s dead now. We never did anything physical.”

Krista considered whether to follow up on the death of Elliot’s admirer/stalker but decided the question veered too close to forbidden territory. “Which leaves us with the question of why you went to a gay bar, willing to be picked up, when you’re not sexually attracted to men.”

Elliot said nothing, tipping his head forward and widening his eyes as if to say he had no idea. “I guess…I guess I wanted to see if I enjoyed it.”

“Enjoyed sex with a man?”

“Yeah. Now that I’m bigger.”

“You wanted to know if your size was the reason you had such negative and conflicting feelings about the sexual contact you had as a child.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds stupid,” said Elliot. “It hurt and made me gag because I was too small. But gay guys and women do that stuff and it’s not that bad for them.”

“Physically, your body is ready to enjoy sex. Do you think that means you should enjoy any kind of sex, with any partner, in any situation?”

“No, but I got scared. This guy was nice. He wasn’t being pushy. If I had told him to back off, he would have listened.”

“You’re saying there was no reason to be afraid of sex with him. But I’m asking if you _wanted_ to have sex with him. That’s a different question.”

Elliot ran his fingers through his hair. After a moment’s silence, he said, “No, I guess I didn’t. I wanted to…I wanted to be able to want to.”

Krista waited in silence. There were enough possibilities that any directive questioning would only be a shot in the dark.

“I think…I think I wanted to know that he didn’t ruin that for me.”

“You might never have enjoyed sex with men regardless of your experiences. The best available science says that childhood sexual experiences do not cause adult sexual orientation, but there’s no way to know for sure. If there’s a sexual act you want to do, but you’re inhibited by anxiety, dissociation, or flashbacks, you can use the desensitization procedure. But right now, I’m worried that you’ve exposed yourself to a frightening experience, not because you’ve planned to use it to overcome your anxiety, but because you’re trying to re-enact the harm that was done to you.”

Elliot furrowed his brow. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s looking for predictability, and what’s familiar is predictable. Maybe it’s an attempt to better understand what happened to you as a child by re-creating the original trauma. Maybe it’s a form of self-punishment, a way to deal with lingering guilt or convince yourself that it wasn’t so bad. All I know is that it’s fairly common across many different types of childhood maltreatment.” She left off a fourth possibility, to avoid putting it in his head if it wasn’t there already: Some survivors of sexual violence, primarily men, became preoccupied with the thought that they were hurting their partners through consensual sex, i.e., having a penis put in me was awful, so it must be awful to have a penis put in you. Men who had these thoughts sometimes sought sexual experiences that would allow them to “prove” to themselves that sex could indeed be pleasant for the receptive partner.

“The thing is, I still want to. Sort of. I want to know what it’s like to do that because I want to.”

“You can’t make yourself want to do something,” said Krista. She was concerned that Elliot was going to end up in the company of a less considerate partner, or even a rapist. She had no professional objections to sexual experimentation, but Elliot’s lack of social awareness and poor understanding of his own motives meant that anonymous hook-ups carried a significant element of risk.

“I want to take a dick. To see what it’s like. I want to know how it feels.”

“Have you considered looking for a female partner to penetrate you or receive oral sex from you? A transgender woman or a woman who is willing to wear a prosthesis?” Krista was still not entirely certain this was a good idea, but Elliot was more likely to enjoy sex with a woman. Statistically speaking, he would also be safer.

Based on Elliot’s expression, he clearly had not considered these options. He changed the topic slightly. “I knew a trans woman once. In lockup. She was really nice to me. Mr. Robot got her pet rat killed. I mean,” Elliot tipped his head to the side, “I did that, while I was acting as Mr. Robot.” He lowered his eyebrows. “We weren’t trying to hurt her. We were actually trying to protect her from these guys who raped her. But we just made it worse.” He had a faraway look as he talked about his time in prison. He shook his head quickly from side to side, as if physically removing himself from the memory. “Anyway, I’ll think about it.”

* * *

“You indicated on the checklist that you wish you could confront your father,” said Krista. “Do you know what you would you like to say?”

“Not confront,” said Elliot. “Just talk to.”

“Mm-hm. And what would you want to talk about?”

“I want to know why he did it.”

“Is there something you’re especially hoping he would say? Something you’re hoping he wouldn’t say?”

Elliot shook his head rapidly, looking like a dog shaking off water. “Can’t we do that role-playing thing again? You pretend to be him and tell me what he would say.”

“The difficulty with that,” said Krista, “is that I don’t know what he would say. Even more, I don’t know if what he would say would be the truth, and I don’t know if either of those things is what you need to hear.”

“You must’ve had clients who really asked their…their person. Most of them are probably still alive. Just tell me what they said.”

“Before confronting their abuser, I encourage clients to spend a considerable length of time thinking about what they hope to get out of the conversation and how their abuser’s response is likely to affect them.”

“I want to know why he did it,” repeated Elliot, his tone almost naïve.

“Even if he were completely committed to telling you the truth, he still might not accurately answer that question. We don’t always know why we do things.” Krista paused. “Abusers rarely take all the responsibility for their actions.”

“I know you don’t know what he was thinking,” said Elliot, “but you guessed. It was in your notes that Vera found. So you must have seen clues, reasons to suspect.”

Krista sighed as she slowly turned her pen around in her hand. “I can tell you an average sort of story, the most common or best guess given what I know about your father. But I need you to understand two things: First, that we have no way of knowing if these guesses are correct and we will probably never know. Second, the events that led to the abuse or made it more likely are not the same as responsibility or blame. A lot of factors have to come together for any criminal act to occur, but only the offender is responsible for what happened.”

Elliot nodded. “I can agree to those conditions.”

Krista took a slow, steady breath. “There are people who are exclusively attracted to prepubescent children. If they ever have sex with adults, it’s part of a con or an act. But most people who are attracted to children are attracted to adults as well. And most of them try, at least some of the time, to resist their urge to offend. If I had to guess, I would place father in the latter group. That would mean he was probably attracted to your mother, at least initially. Now,” she said, “do you recall your father having any friends?”

Elliot shook his head.

“Did he have any close family relationships to his parents, siblings, cousins?”

“No. His mom was dead. He was estranged from his father. He had a sister but they never talked. I think she was a junkie.”

“Based on everything you’ve told me throughout our time together, he didn’t have appropriate adult relationships. I’m not just talking about romance or sex, but all sorts of adult peer interaction. He failed to cultivate or wasn’t able to maintain supportive friendships with adults, which made it easier for him to inappropriately rely on you. He treated you more like a peer than a son at times – taking you to see R-rated movies, applauding you for stealing, confiding in you. He expected you to take the role of an adult friend.

“You’ve also told me that your parents’ marriage had problems. His only adult relationship was becoming strained. He was sexually frustrated and emotionally isolated. He started to see you as not just a friend, but as a romantic and sexual partner. Men in this situation aren’t delusional. They’re not _incapable_ of seeing reality. They just get very good at twisting their perceptions just a little bit, just enough to justify their actions.

“I don’t know what your father was thinking, but I know that men who have committed similar offenses report that they convinced themselves of certain irrational thoughts: That what they’re doing is common, and fears that it will harm children are overblown and Puritanical; that the child’s normal attempts to seek adult attention and affection are actually sexual seduction; that child-adult sex is a healthy and appropriate way to show love.

“Once your father began molesting you, he must have seen signs that his actions were harmful, but he couldn’t admit to himself that he needed to stop while at the same time maintaining his belief in those self-justifying irrational thoughts. And sexual gratification is a powerful drive. In order to stop, he’d have to admit that what had already done was wrong. So wrong that that would never be able to make it right. Certainly not in the time he had left. So he continued until the signs he was hurting you were so blatant he couldn’t make himself ignore them.”

Elliot rolled his head back and forth on his shoulders, settling his gaze to the left. “That’s a really shitty reason.”

“Which part?”  
  
“All of it. Because he didn’t get along with adults? Because he was fighting with my mom? Because he just really wanted to get off and didn’t fucking care about me?”

“It would make more sense to you if there were a more drastic cause.”

“Why couldn’t he have a brain tumor?” asked Elliot. “And before you ask, he didn’t. Because of the lawsuit, he had a complete autopsy.”

“You wish there could have been some outside force that made him do what he did.”

Elliot scratched his chin. “Everyone looks at the Nazis and thinks they’re monsters – I don’t mean thinking they’re bad, but thinking they’re inhuman. They think, if it were me, I would fight them. I wouldn’t go along. But it’s not like all the bad people were born in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. There were people in other countries who were just as selfish, just as cowardly, just as weak. But they never had to stand up to the Nazis. They never got offered a job with the SS. They never had to risk themselves and their families to say no.”

“If little causes are all it takes, it feels to you like anyone could molest their children.”

“Is there something about the kid? I’m not trying to say it was my fault, just that…with my mom, she was worse with Darlene than me. There was something about Darlene that just made her see red. That wasn’t Darlene’s fault. It was just…she brought something different out of my mom than I did.”

Krista took a moment to consider Elliot’s question. Her first impulse was indeed to point out that children are not to blame to adult actions toward them, but Elliot had carefully differentiated between probability and responsibility. “We know that some children are more likely to be abused than others. In terms of sexual abuse, girls are more likely to be abused than boys, for example. Children who are poorly supervised, who are generally more isolated, who have a poor relationship with the nonoffending caregiver, they’re at greater risk, especially for repeated abuse.”

“Because if I had been close with my mom, I would have told her.”

“Yes. Or she would have noticed and responded to your father’s unusual behavior toward you. It would have been more likely, though far from inevitable.”

Elliot ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t think my dad was gay. I guess he could have been bisexual, but I never saw that either. I’m not- God, I’m really glad it wasn’t Darlene, but why-” Elliot sighed.

“You’re wondering why a heterosexual man would choose to target his son and not his daughter?”

Elliot nodded.

“There are a lot of possibilities. Individuals who have a sexual attraction to both adults and pre-pubescent children sometimes report that the gender or genders they’re attracted to in adults differ from their pedophilic attractions. Attraction to children is more commonly bisexual than attraction to adults. It’s also possible he was influenced by the differences in your physical development. He may have considered her too young and small for sex. Or he found it easier to get time alone with you than with her.” Krista pursed her lips. “If my guess was correct, and he wanted his victim to play the role of a peer in his life, it may have been differences in your mental development – who he believed could understand adult issues and problems.”

“So he did-“ There was a catch in Elliot’s voice. “So he did think…I was special.”


	14. Sometimes you have to solve problems that aren't your fault

“I got an interview.”

“Hm?” Krista couldn’t keep herself from sounding surprised.

“I was just looking, like you said, and I saw some things I could apply for. It’s with a non-profit. I’d be writing code to track back revenge porn and try to remove it.”

“You’d be helping people who were sexually victimized.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it like that. Just that it’s not government and not corporate.”

Krista folded her hands. It seemed too soon for Elliot to resume work, but then most of her patients lacked the financial freedom to go without income for several months, so full employment was not incompatible with his symptoms. And work had benefits beyond money. It caused stress, but it gave people something to do, something to work toward, something to accomplish. It was a social outlet, a reason to maintain a schedule, a source of identity. A job would be good for Elliot, especially the one he described. Despite his blasé response, she was sure that empathy for victims of sexual misconduct played a role in his decision to apply. If he couldn’t go back in time and save himself, at least he could save others.

“How do you feel about the possibility of returning to work?” asked Krista.

Elliot shrugged. “I think they have a dress code,” he said, with only a hint of grumbling.

“Have you thought about how your mental health problems might interact with this job?”

“You mean Mr. Robot? I’ve turned it over and over, and I don’t see how he can do much damage. And he doesn’t come out so much. Or, he doesn’t take over. He’s just sort of…another way for me to be. But it’s still me.”

“I’m glad to hear that. But I actually wasn’t talking about Mr. Robot. I was talking about anxiety you might experience hearing about or seeing evidence of sexual harm.”

“I thought about that, too,” said Elliot. “How do people handle…I can’t flip out at work.”

“Ideally, no, at least not in front of people, but if this is an organization that tackles revenge porn, I would be very surprised if you were the only worker with a history of sexual victimization. If one day you were overcome and had a panic attack, I suspect the people who chose to work there would be the type of people who would understand.”

“I don’t want them to understand,” snapped Elliot. He ran his hand over his face. “I mean, they can, they can understand what they want, but I’m not going to tell them about,” he gestured vaguely in his own direction, “about this.”

“I’m glad you recognize that in yourself. You’re setting a limit. You don’t want to tell co-workers or bosses, even caring ones, about your personal abuse history. But do you think you could explain getting upset without revealing personal details?”

Elliot’s head tilted to the left, brow furrowed skeptically.

“What if you said, ‘Sometimes things like that really get to me’?”

“That doesn’t explain anything.”

“It explains that you had a reaction to seeing or hearing something that is especially upsetting to you, which is really all they need to know.” It was one of those sentences she had honed over years of use to an exact phrasing which could conceivably encompass both a PTSD flashback and a non-trauma-related personal preference.

“What if I get freaked out all the time? I don’t think that excuse would work over and over.”

“I don’t think you’ll get freaked out all the time.”

“Because of desensitization,” said Elliot.

“That’s right,” said Krista. “But the answer is more complicated. If you have a strong reaction every once in a while, a good employer will let you work around it. You can take a long lunch and pull yourself together, or take a sick day. But if you have strong reactions very often, or if you find you’re tense and irritable all the time, that workplace probably isn’t right for you.”

Elliot nodded, but he said, “I don’t even have the job yet. It’s just an interview.”

After a pause, Krista asked, “Have you started hacking your prospective employers?”

“Do you want to know that stuff?”

“Maybe not the details, but I think the topic in general is worth talking about.” She opened her file folder and pulled out the checklist of common issues faced by adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse that Elliot had completed. “I noticed that you didn’t mark off ‘violating others’ privacy’. You don’t think that’s something you do?”

“I thought it meant, like, spying on the women’s locker room. I don’t do that. And besides, the hacking isn’t related to what my dad did. It’s just practical.”

“Any problem that can be caused by a history of abuse can be caused by something else. But the problems on the list are more common in people who have been sexually abused. In this case, it’s about trust and control. You hack people because you don’t trust them. Because you have to know everything about them and you can’t wait for them to willingly reveal it. You worry they have a dark secret or you’ll need to manipulate or blackmail them. Hacking people puts you in control.”

Elliot scoffed. “Half the time they _do_ have a dark secret.”

“Maybe. But maybe most of those secrets are just embarrassing. Do you really need to proactively catch people having affairs, using drugs, stealing small amounts of money, and so on?”

“There are very bad people in the world.” Elliot leaned forward, chin up, so he was looking down, a posture suggestive of Mr. Robot.

“And I’m not suggesting that you ignore them if you find them. But once you told me you ‘hack everyone’. You want that power, that control of knowing more about others than they do about you. That’s not about catching truly bad people.”

“I’m not stealing from them or blackmailing them.”

“How do you think most people would feel if they knew?”

Elliot sighed, his head tipping back and forth resignedly. They both knew the answer to that question. But there was also a stubborn set to his chin.

“How would you feel if your prospective employer got ahold of my therapy notes and found out about your childhood experiences before meeting you?” Vera certainly exemplified invasion of privacy, but he had obviously evil motives, so she had to use a hypothetical to prompt Elliot.

“Why are you asking me this shit?”

“I’m trying to establish that there are downsides to your actions,” said Krista. “How would your life be different if you gave up hacking everyone you know?”

“I wouldn’t have information about them.” Elliot looked uncomfortable. “Well, I’d still have some. Whatever they told me.”

“And how would that make you feel?”

“I don’t…it would be…I don’t know how people talk to each other without knowing that stuff.”

That was interesting. She knew that Elliot used his hacking to protect himself and others from material harm – to identify threats and to prepare a counterattack or pre-emptive strike. But she also knew that he had a lot of difficulty with social interaction. He didn’t seem to be lacking in an underlying capacity for social skills – he could read body language, attend to others’ feelings, express himself in literal and nonliteral ways – but he had a significant lack of experience because he had isolated himself. “Most people don’t have that kind of information about each other. Conversation works anyway.”

“Not for me.” He shook his head. “I can’t reveal what I know, but it gives me parameters. Where are the sore subjects? If I ask about their weekend, am I going to get an unbearable twelve-minute rant about a bad call in a pointless athletic competition?”

“How do you think normal people handle those problems?”

“Normal people care about the same sports nonsense.”

“Not necessarily. Have you ever seen someone abruptly change the subject, or make an excuse to leave because they’re bored?”

Elliot looked as though he were currently considering those options, or possibly setting a distraction fire and running out of the room. Finally, he said, “It’s how I do things.”

“You’re here because the way you believe you can change the way you do things.”

* * *

There is no ending to this. There could be a conclusion to Elliot’s therapy with Krista, though that would be many months in the future, but that wouldn’t be the end. There would still be symptoms and problems that Elliot would have to solve on his own or with help. I don’t know if he got the job. He might have. He might not have. He might have been hired, only to quit a few weeks later when he found he was too overwhelmed. I don’t know if he moved in Darlene and if he did, I don’t know if he stayed. I know he had to put a lot of effort into practicing human interaction, which meant a lot of discomfort and failure. I know he tried to go to a support group but he couldn’t bring himself to speak and he didn’t go back for a long time. Maybe he did much later. I know he hacked more people – innocent people – because he wanted to feel powerful. But he felt bad about it and he did it less often than before. He’ll have a girlfriend, but things won’t work out. Of course, that’s how every relationship goes until it’s not. He’s doing better. There’s no way to know what happens next.

**Author's Note:**

> Actual therapy doesn't have a narratively satisfying plot arc. It's repetitive and moves at a very slow pace. Many of the ideas that Krista presents to Elliot would have to be introduced many times before they stuck. There's no final boss to defeat. Patients' progress doesn't have a climax.
> 
> Elliot was undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy. The cognitive part was realizing that some of his beliefs about himself and the world. The behavioral part was learning the skills that he failed to develop because he was avoiding normal life challenges. I decided that skill development was not going to be particularly interesting to read about, especially because post-therapy Elliot was acting less and less like the neurotic character in the show.


End file.
